What eight years on the CMA panel taught me about expert evidence and digital markets

My appointment as a specialist panel member at the Competition and Markets Authority came to an end this month with the publication of the PR24 water redeterminations. I joined the panel in October 2017. My eight-year term expired in October 2025, but was extended to allow me to complete the PR24 process - something I was glad to do.

The CMA panel is an unusual institution. It sits at arm's length from the CMA's executive, convened case by case to make final decisions in Phase 2 merger inquiries, market investigations and regulatory appeals. Panel members are appointed for their independent judgment, not as representatives of any interest. The decisions the panel makes can have very significant consequences - for companies, for consumers, for entire sectors - and the process is designed to ensure those decisions are reached rigorously and without institutional bias.

Over eight years the range of work was wide. On the mergers side I sat on cases across sectors including media, financial services, satellite communications, industrial services and medical devices. On the markets side, the mobile browsers and cloud services investigation - examining Apple's and Google's hold over how hundreds of millions of people access the internet on their phones - was among the most consequential pieces of work the CMA has undertaken. And the PR24 water redeterminations, five simultaneous references conducted against a backdrop of acute public and political scrutiny of the water sector, was a fitting conclusion.

Two cases deserve particular mention for what they revealed about where competition policy is heading. The Adobe/Figma merger and the mobile browsers investigation both involved the CMA's Digital Markets Unit working alongside the panel group. The DMU brings a different set of analytical tools and instincts to digital markets - an understanding of ecosystems, of network effects, of the ways in which market power compounds over time in ways that traditional merger analysis was not designed to catch. Working alongside those teams gave me a close appreciation of how they think and what they are trying to achieve. It is some of the most intellectually demanding work happening anywhere in UK economic policy.

What makes that work possible, of course, is the people doing it. CMA case teams - economists, lawyers, project managers, analysts - work with a skill, dedication and public-spirited commitment that is easy to overlook from the outside. They are not well paid relative to the private sector work many of them could be doing. They do it because they believe it matters. In my experience, it does.

Mobile browsers: CMA case page

Adobe/Figma: CMA case page