Since roughly 2000, the EU Commission’s approach to competition analysis has changed, using a more economics-focused methodology, the so-called more economic approach (MEA). This chapter discusses the MEA, and its application to two crises and a sustainability/animal welfare initiative. These illustrate the use of the MEA to analyse and ultimately condemn such practices. These cases provide evidence that competition authorities have ended their tolerance for such schemes. Now, with the MEA, all such schemes are strictly analysed using the lens of consumer welfare. This of course has an advantage. Undertakings cannot ‘crisis-wash’ their behaviour, i.e. ‘dress up’ otherwise anti-competitive practices as ‘industrial crises’ to disguise a pernicious cartel. But the downsides of this new approach are that broader social concerns cannot be taken into consideration to the degree that they were in the past and the new approach may not be consistent with other goals of the EU (linked to competition via TFEU 11 and TEU 3(3)), or to other elements of UK legal order.

The economic disruption resulting from the pandemic has resulted in suggestions from the business community that these rules should be relaxed. As examples, the grocery industry pressed for the competition rules to be relaxed so that major grocery chains could ensure that stores remained open and stocked in the face of staff shortages and supply chain/logistics disruptions. Relaxing the rules, the industry argued, would allow the public to be better served. The chairman of a retail chain criticised the decision to block that firm’s prosed take over of a rival as being ‘absurd’ given the retail conditions, suggesting that that merger rules be relaxed to allow the retail sector to survive. The grocery industry’s pleas were successful: the government relaxed the competition regime applicable to that industry. This chapter analyses the need for these proposals to relax the competition in the economic context surrounding Covid-19. In particular, it argues that even in the context of this disruption, relaxing the competition rules was the wrong response.