EU - UK Competition Cooperation Agreement is signed

10 years and three days after former UK Prime Minister David Cameron announced in the House of Commons that there would be a referendum on Brexit, the EU and the UK have moved a little closer together.

On 25 February 2026, the EU and the UK signed an agreement to facilitate competition enforcement between the two sides.This is the “Agreement between the European Union and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland regarding cooperation on the application of their competition laws”.

While not fully restoring the UK’s position in the EU competition network, the 14-article agreement facilitates and regulates cooperation between, on the one hand, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and, on the other hand, the European Commission and with national competition authorities (NCAs) in the EU (such as Ireland’s Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC)).

The purpose of the agreement is described in article 1: “…to promote cooperation and coordination in competition matters between competition authorities of the Union and of its Member States, of the one part, and of the United Kingdom, of the other part, in order to enhance the effective enforcement of the competition laws of the Union and of the United Kingdom.”

Interestingly, article 3 of the Agreement provides for each side to alert the other about cases of mutual interest – article 3(1) provides that if “a competition authority considers that any of its enforcement activities is likely to affect the important interests of the other Party, it shall notify the other competition authorities concerned of that enforcement activity” and, under article 3(2), it shall do so promptly.

There is to be “coordination of enforcement activities” under article 4. For example, there could be coordination in terms of the timing of competition enforcement activities (e.g. dawn raids) between the CMA in the UK and, say, the European Commission or the CCPC on the EU/Irish side.

However, there are limits to the co-operation. In necessary but somewhat Orwellian and oxymoronic language, “negative comity” is at the heart of article 5 which is a guardrail against either party’s actions damaging the “important interests of the other”:

Article 5 – Negative comity

1.Within the framework of the domestic law applicable to them and to the extent compatible with their own important interests, competition authorities shall give careful consideration to each other’s important interests throughout all phases of their enforcement activities.

2.If it appears that a competition authority’s enforcement activities may adversely affect the important interests of any of the other competition authorities, the competition authorities concerned shall make all reasonable efforts to arrive at an appropriate accommodation of each other’s important interests.”

The competition authorities involved may, under article 6, share information “to the extent that the sharing of that information is lawful under applicable domestic law, including that on confidentiality and data protection”. There are restrictions under article 7 on how the information is used. Confidentiality is protected under article 8 and there are provisions in article 9 on “accidental use or disclosure”. There will be challenges in operating the agreement – in particular, relating to the exchange of confidential information. Article 6(2) is interesting:

In that context, the European Commission’s press release provides quite simply:

“the agreement sets out the duty of the competition authorities to protect the confidentiality of shared information. The consent of the companies that provided the confidential information will remain necessary before sharing it between competition authorities.”

Legally, this is a “supplementary agreement” to the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement.

From an Irish perspective, the Agreement lists the Irish agency involved - just the CCPC but curiously does not include the Commission for Communications Regulation (ComReg) which also has competition powers. Nor does it provide for any Irish agency or person (other than the CCPC) which could be involved in media merger control now or in the future. This is something which could well be reviewed in the next amendment to the Agreement.

Businesses should expect that this agreement will mean that there will be, almost always, very full and frank cooperation between the UK and the EU/Member State competition agencies. Businesses should expect that whatever one agency knows, the other may well know it too.

The EU already has comparable agreements with the USA (1991), Canada (1999), Japan (2003), South Korea (2009) and Switzerland (2013). In time, one could see agreements with, at least, India and South Africa.

The agreement is now signed – by the European Commission’s Teresa Ribera (Executive Vice-President for a Clean, Just and Competitive Transition and Commissioner for Competition at the European Commission) and the UK’s Peter Kyle (the UK’s Secretary of State for Business and Trade).

However, both sides need to ratify it. On the EU side, this means that (a) the Council would adopt a decision to conclude the new EU-UK Competition Cooperation Agreement and (b) the European Parliament would give its consent.

The band hadn’t got back together again – the BritIn Referendum is a while off – but there is going to be more “co-operation in competition”.

For more information, please contact Dr. Vincent Power or any member of the EU, Competition & Procurement team.

Date published: 26 February 2026