The British are moving from two antitrust authorities to one

Story here. Excerpt:

Britain’s competition regime is to be revamped in a shake-up under which the Office of Fair Trading and the Competition Commission will merge.

The restructuring of the competition bodies, to reduce costs and speed up investigations, will probably be one of the most contentious cuts to public bodies to be announced on Thursday in the government’s “bonfire of the quangos”.

The government’s plan to merge the OFT and the commission rolls back the long-standing two-tier competition system, reinforced by the Labour government, in favour of the single-body model favoured by many other industrialised countries.

The new body will probe mergers, market dominance and cartels, but it and other competition bodies will probably farm out many consumer functions to Citizens Advice and local trading standards officers.

Big companies have long pressed for faster and less onerous antitrust probes, claiming the overlap between the OFT and the commission is wasteful and confusing.