REVIEW 2025: CMA rollercoaster yet to reach its end

As one year gives way to another, it’s natural to reflect on what’s gone and look forward to what awaits in the 12 months ahead.

In doing that, at least from a journalist’s perspective, certain stories come to mind as the stand-out moments of a specific year while others emerge as the defining issues of an era.

And then there are those issues which keep hovering over one’s professional landscape from one year to the next, their outcome unknown and their consequences unclear.

More than two years have now passed since the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) issued its initial call for evidence on companion animal veterinary services.

In doing so, it fired the starting gun on a process that has already had a profound impact on the sector even before its final reform proposals are known.

Rollercoaster

Yet if 2024 was a year of recovery from the blow of the CMA moving from evidence gathering to formal investigation, 2025 became more of a rollercoaster and the ride hasn’t finished yet.

Hopes that the year might bring some sort of closure were only ultimately dashed in June with the announcement of a six-month extension to the inquiry process.

But it was the release of the authority’s provisional remedy proposals which sent real shockwaves through the sector in mid-October.

Those recommendations weren’t all bad. Even though Defra had been holding talks with various veterinary stakeholders throughout the year, the call for urgent consideration of legislative reform gave a much-needed external boost to one of the sector’s longest standing current aspirations.

But if its collective reaction can be taken as a reasonable guide, that was where the good news began and ended.

Disconnect

Even though many stakeholders have continued to stress their support for the process publicly, the mood of the sector, as expressed by the overwhelming message from the Federation of Independent Veterinary Practices’ autumn survey or those delegates who attended and took part in discussions on it at November’s London Vet Show could not really be doubted.

As 2025 comes to an end, there appears to be a disconnect between a regulator that believes its work will deliver meaningful benefits for pet owners and a sector which fears it will only make matters worse through higher costs and even practice closures.

How that feedback, and particularly the unity with which those concerns have been expressed across the sector, shapes the inquiry group’s thinking is likely to provide a defining moment in early 2026 with its final remedy decisions currently due for release in February or March.

The sector may hope, as one vet put it to me at London Vet Show, that the CMA is listening again. But it can’t bank on that. As 2026 dawns, it must be ready for whatever those now sitting in judgement upon it may have in store.