ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the ways in which Community and UK competition laws are enforced. The chapter will review the administrative framework for enforcement in each system, the bodies involved in enforcement, and outline the relevant rules for investigation, decision-making and judicial review. The starting point is the Community framework of centralised enforcement led by the Commission, although the recent developments moving away from that model will also be discussed. In particular, we shall address the recent modernisation of Community competition law enforcement proposed in the Commission’s White Paper of 1999 and introduced by Regulation 1/2003.1 In the UK context, the changes in enforcement structure introduced by the Competition Act 1998 and the Enterprise Act 2002 will be outlined in tandem with the few remaining elements of the previous administrative framework. Thereafter, the relationship between the enforcement of Community and national competition rules will be examined, in particular the doctrine of supremacy of Community law. Markets, and hence the application of competition rules in relation to market behaviour, are not necessarily confined to the territorial boundaries of either the Community or the UK, particularly given the increasing tendency towards the globalisation of markets. Accordingly, the potential for the extraterritorial application of the competition rules will be considered together with steps towards international co-operation in competition law enforcement.
