EV does it? CMA’s electric vehicles market study and chargepoints investigation
Global | Video | April 2022 | 4:50
Video Details
| Jason Logendra | Thank you for coming here today, Richard. It’s good to talk to you about EV charging, seen as a key element in the Government’s drive to achieve net zero and meet those ambitions. And the CMA has been very active in this area as well, looking at electric vehicle charging points. Do you have any thoughts on the CMA’s current initiatives? |
| Richard Whish QC | Well, yes, I think it has been a very interesting piece of work. Competition authorities, they sometimes conduct market studies, where they think to themselves we need to understand more about a particular sector or particular phenomenon. It’s like the upstream research and development that companies do. And they decided in December 2020 that they would look into whether there were competition issues around the charging of electric vehicles. So they started a market study, as I say, in December 2020 and they decided that this wasn’t a sector that merited a market investigation reference. But they did discover some competition issues that they thought were worthy of further examination. |
| Jason Logendra | And I think that what we’ve seen is that the CMA has recently concluded that investigation into exclusive supply agreements, relating to motorway service areas… |
| Richard Whish QC | Well, yes, so the point was that they discovered that, obviously, anyone wanting to recharge a vehicle will often be driving on the country’s motorways. And you’ve got motorway service stations, many of which are operated by Extra, by Roadchef and by MOTO. And Gridserve supplies chargepoints at those service stations, but the agreements between it and the service stations are exclusive. And, obviously, in competition law terms that raises a question under Chapter I Competition Act, even conceivably under Chapter II. And the CMA decided to investigate and did come to the conclusion that this exclusivity could be problematic in terms of having competition between providers of chargepoints. |
| Jason Logendra | I think one of the interesting aspects of this is that the CMA did find that The Electric Highway was justified in having exclusive agreements, it was more the duration of the agreements… |
| Richard Whish QC | Well, that’s right, because clearly if you’re providing those kind of chargepoints there is money involved in establishing the infrastructure and so on, and that can justify exclusivity. What the CMA was not happy with, however, was the duration of the exclusivity. And so the commitments – the case has been resolved by commitments, which were formally accepted on 8 March – provide that the exclusivity would be terminated, I think it’s from November 2026 going forward. And Gridserve committed to those commitments, as do the service stations themselves. There is a different point though, which is that the Government is going to be making money available for rapid charging of cars at certain points in the country and what the Government wants is to say that where its funding is used there should be no exclusivity whatsoever, and so the commitments also say that the exclusivity will be terminated now in relation to those sites rather than in 2026. |
| Jason Logendra | And something we’ve seen… Well, we’ve seen the Government and the CMA working quite closely together, or it seems to be in achieving the strategic outcome. Is that, sort of, pincer movement, is that the result of the strategic steer or some closer working between the CMA and Government? |
| Richard Whish QC | Well, let’s face it, this is a Government policy to phase out the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2030. Obviously, there’s a number of different policy initiatives that are needed there, not all of which relate to competition. And it seems to me absolutely sensible that the CMA takes care of the competition bit of it and the Government carries on with its own initiatives, and it’s nice to see that it is all coordinated, yes. |
| Jason Logendra | So it is certainly an area where, I think, as you see a Government strategy towards opening up EV charging, you see the action by the CMA, it could be an area to continue watching. |
| Richard Whish QC | Oh most certainly, yes, it’s important stuff. |
| Jason Logendra | Thank you, Richard. |