The CMA pricing pressures response has arrived in the form Britain trusts most: a letter. The competition watchdog’s Chief Executive has written to the Chancellor about monitoring pricing pressures, consumer protection and competition in heating oil, road fuel and other key markets. Prices were unavailable for comment, having suddenly discovered the professional advantages of being out of the office.
A letter is an elegant weapon. It does not chase a petrol pump down the road or confiscate a heating oil invoice. It sits on a desk and politely asks whether the market has considered behaving itself. Every price tag is now expected to look busy, reasonable and deeply insulted that anyone noticed it becoming expensive.
The correspondence sets out action to monitor pricing pressures and ensure competition is working effectively. This is the sort of sentence that makes a price board straighten its tie. It has nothing to hide, it insists, apart from the part where it rose while everyone was making tea and then developed a sudden interest in economic complexity.
Monitoring pricing pressures is not the same as putting a price in the stocks and throwing loose change at it. It does mean that someone official is paying attention. A loaf of bread is already rehearsing an explanation involving transport costs, global conditions and an invoice it has never personally met.
Consumer protection also appears in the letter, offering the public a comforting image of an official peering at the market through spectacles while the market insists it has always been this expensive. Competition then enters like a contestant on a game show and is asked to prove it is competing, rather than standing beside another price and nodding in professional agreement.
The correspondence is not a voucher for cheaper everything. No envelope can make a tank of fuel cost what it did when people still owned CDs. Yet scrutiny has its charms. A watched price may not boil, but it may stop practising denial in the mirror and prepare an answer containing fewer words such as dynamic, complicated and nothing to do with us.
The markets now face Britain’s rarest penalty: being asked to explain themselves in writing. If they produce a convincing account by teatime, they may escape with a warning. If not, the CMA could send another letter, at which point prices will discover the one thing they fear more than public anger: administration.
Source: GOV.UK.
