Fair Civil Justice engaged Law Firm Dnes & Felver to produce an expert report on the UK’s competition law class action regime.
The research is a response to the former Competition Appeal Tribunal President Sir Peter Roth’s lecture on his experience in UK competition law, which raised some significant points about the class action debate.
It warns that many cases drift away from genuine competition law harm, urging a sharper focus on clear market failures, regulatory context, and whether litigation actually improves market outcomes for consumers.
The report makes five key recommendations to improve the UK’s class action regime:
- Require early estimates of how many consumers will actually claim. Studies consistently show that without automatic refund mechanisms, fewer than 5% of eligible claimants come forward.
- Publish a transparent dashboard of costs, fees and payouts, binding lawyers and funders to their promises rather than revealing the numbers only when costs are already sunk.
- Focus on overcharges rather than modelling damages across supply chains.
- Introduce Presumptive Allocation Schemes (PEAS). Rather than litigating the precise split of damages across the supply chain, adopt a presumptive formula that saw 50% to direct purchasers, 25% to indirect purchasers, and 25% split among further layers.
- Require claimants to state a specific market failure from day one. CPO applications should identify the market failure being addresses, engage with existing regulatory action, and assess whether the market is dynamic or genuinely stagnant, to avoid punishing firms for growth or re-examining pre-settled cases.
It is time for the CAT and government to act, to ensure that competition law is not being misused to bring broader claims, and that legitimate claims are meritorious, the costs are transparent, and claims distribution is prioritised.
Please read the full report here: https://dnesfelver.com/responding-to-the-2025-burrell-lecture-five-proposals-for-class-action-reform/
