Watchdog struggles to hire lawyers as salaries soar in private sector

The competition watchdog is struggling to attract qualified staff because of soaring salaries in a booming private sector, its boss has said.

Dr Andrea Coscelli said that the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) needs to hire more staff to ensure that it exercises its post-Brexit powers, but that it is difficult to fill some jobs.

“For mergers, antitrust and digital it is a bit tougher, because the private sector market is very hot at the moment in those areas,” he told MPs on the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee.

“As you know there’s very significant M&A (mergers and acquisitions) activity and salaries for lawyers have increased very significantly.

“We have civil service pay scales – we’ve had a pay freeze over the last 12 months – so it’s not super easy,”

He said this was “a risk” for the CMA going forward.

Since Brexit the watchdog has had to take over many of the powers that were previously run by the European Commission in Brussels.

It has pushed Mr Coscelli’s budget from £65 million to £130 million a year. However his staff are still only paid civil servant wages, which struggle to compete with private law practices.

He also said the CMA does not have the powers it needs to go after companies that break consumer laws.

“The reality is that we have powers that we think are not really sufficient to deal with the level of detriment we see,” he said.

“We have to be quite selective about what we go after. The reason is that we cannot fine companies, so if we find a problem we have to threaten to take companies to court.”

He added: “Not having fining powers – as a number of lawyers have told me – doesn’t really make the case for compliance. Because essentially companies are sitting there, waiting to see whether we go after them or not.”

Mr Coscelli said: “18 months ago we did a big study on online advertising and we found a number of problems there,” he said.

“So in an ideal world we would want to have new powers and be able to designate Google and Facebook as having strategic market status and impose a code of conduct on them. We think that would be plan A, the best way forward.”

He said that the CMA’s current powers are “plan B” and could lead to it spending years going through the courts.