How to Complain under Competition Act 1998

The Competition Act 1998 gives the UK competition authorities wide-ranging powers to investigate and take action against anti-competitive activity in the UK.

You do not have to be directly involved in an activity to make a complaint. You may contact us if you suspect that any company supplying services relating to railways is involved in activities that are prohibited by the Competition Act 1998.

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Format

There is no set format for making a complaint under the Competition Act 1998. You should outline the nature of your complaint and include as much information as possible. For the complaint to be effective, we need supporting evidence to back up your allegation.

It would be helpful if you include details of your relationship (if any) with the business(es) concerned, notes of telephone conversations, copies of any correspondence and anything else you may consider relevant. When we have considered the material you have provided, we may need to ask you for more details.

Complaints are an extremely important source of information about anti-competitive activity and we actively encourage complaints from businesses and individuals who suspect that a breach of the Competition Act is taking place.

We will let you know how we propose to deal with your complaint and will keep you informed of progress.

Confidentiality

In order to investigate a complaint fully, we will generally need to divulge the information we have obtained to the company being investigated.

If you consider that any of the information you have provided to back up your complaint contains commercial information relating to a business/individual, and that its disclosure might seriously damage those interests, you should clearly mark it as confidential and explain why you think it should be treated as such. However, you should try to keep the amount of such information to a minimum to enable your complaint to be pursued effectively.

If we consider it absolutely necessary to disclose any of the confidential information that you have provided, we will, where possible, discuss with you beforehand.

We will not make public the identity of a complainant without his or her consent. There are circumstances where it is also possible to protect the identity of the complainant from the undertaking being investigated. If you are concerned about the disclosure of your identity, you should raise this at the earliest opportunity.

Who can complain and why?

You do not have to be directly involved in an activity to make a complaint. You may get in touch with us if you suspect that any company supplying services relating to railways is involved in activities prohibited by the Competition Act 1998.

You may have cause to complain if you think that a company is breaching one of the Act's prohibitions. Some examples that may indicate anti-competitive behaviour include:

  • a major supplier has suddenly decided, for no apparent reason, to  discontinue supplying you with a product.
  • quotes from various suppliers are surprisingly and unusually similar.
  • major supplier will only sell you a product if you buy an unconnected product.
  • on entering a market, you find that a major competitor has responded by dropping his prices to extremely low levels, which you suspect would not cover its costs.

The fact that a company is engaged in any of the behaviour shown in the examples above does not mean that it has necessarily committed an infringement. This will depend on the circumstances of the case.

Under the Competition Act 1998, the Chapter I prohibition is breached only where the agreement or arrangement in question has an appreciable effect on competition. A Chapter II prohibition is breached only where the undertaking engaged in the conduct in question is in a dominant position and has abused that position. In some cases the behaviour in question may be a perfectly legitimate response to rigorous competition in the market.

Last updated: 25 February 2008

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