On 15 March 2012, the
UK Government's
Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) announced proposals for strengthening competition in the UK by merging the
Office of Fair Trading and the
Competition Commission to create a new single Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). On 15 July 2013, BIS announced the first stage of an open public consultation period and published a summary setting out the background to the consultation and inviting views on the draft guidance for the CMA. The first stage of the consultation ended on 6 September 2013. On 17 September, BIS announced the second consultation stage, which closed on 7 November 2013. During 2013 and 2014, the CMA announced several waves of appointments at the director level, reporting to members of the senior executive team. Following a consultation, the CMA published the Rules of Procedure for CMA merger, market, and special reference groups on 28 March 2014. On 12 August 2019, the CMA's London office moved to The Cabot, 25 Cabot Square in the
Canary Wharf business estate. In 2021, the CMA announced that it would establish branch offices in
Manchester and
Darlington. The Manchester office would house the Digital Markets Unit, charged with "oversee[ing] a new regulatory regime for the most powerful digital firms", forming a 'Digital Hub' with the Digital Regulation Co-operation Forum. The Darlington office, part of the UK Government's Darlington Economic Campus, would be home to the Microeconomics Unit, in charge of the economic research and evaluation functions of the CMA, including production of the State of Competition report. The Microeconomics Unit is intended to complement the
Bank of England's role in
macroeconomics, and in July 2023 announced a research and skills-development partnership with the Durham Research in Economic Analysis and Mechanisms centre at
Durham University. On 21 January 2025, Marcus Bokkerink resigned from the post of chair of the CMA, after disagreements with government ministers on how to drive growth, prosperity and opportunity for the UK. Bokkerink advocated an approach that focused on empowering consumers to make choices, fostering competition, creating a level playing field for challengers as well as incumbents, and creating the conditions for the resulting innovation, productivity growth and investment to diffuse across the economy, safeguarded by an independent competition and consumer protection authority. He was replaced by former Amazon UK boss,
Doug Gurr, on an interim basis, and in April 2026 permanently. On 31 July 2025, the CMA published its final decision in the cloud infrastructure services market investigation, concluding that competition is "not working well" and recommending further action, including potential use of new Digital Markets powers. ==Responsibilities==