Fair Trading Act 1973
The Fair Trading Act 1973 created the statutory office of the Director General of Fair Trading, usually known (together with his staff) as the Office of Fair Trading (OFT). Amongst other matters, the act governed merger control and inquiries into "scale" and "complex" monopoly situations.
The Fair Trading Act 1973 has now been repealed in its entirety.
Most of the provisions of the Fair Trading Act 1973 were repealed by the Enterprise Act 2002. The remaining newspaper merger provisions were subsequently repealed by the Communications Act 2003. The Competition Act 1998 had previously reduced the scope of the Fair Trading Act 1973 by establishing a prohibition-based system of competition law for anti-competitive and abusive practices.
The Competition Commission's website includes electronic versions of the reports produced by itself and its predecessor bodies (the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, Monopolies Commission, and Monopolies and Restrictive Practices Commission) under the Enterprise Act 2002, some industry-specific statutes, the Fair Trading Act 1973 and earlier legislation. The catalogue is organised in chronological order (going back to 1950) and is available at:
http://www.competition-commission.org.uk/rep_pub/reports/index.htm
The full original text of the Fair Trading Act 1973 is available from the UK Statute Law Database.
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Last changed by 81.151.206.62 at 12:32 PM on Saturday 17 May 2008.