Law Commission to consider consumer class action regime

Introduction

The Law Commission has announced a new project that will consider the potential introduction of a collective class action regime for consumer law claims. The project will identify the benefits and risks associated with the introduction of such a regime and will also make recommendations as to its design, whether any regime should be opt-in as well as opt-out, how certification and class definition should operate, how proceedings should be managed, and how issues of damages, costs, settlement and litigation funding should be addressed.

The Law Commission has been asked to consider the Government's conclusions in its review of the existing opt-out regime for competition law claims in the Competition Appeal Tribunal ("CAT") as part of its work, which have yet to be published. The project is also expressly being examined alongside public enforcement and ADR, suggesting that the Law Commission is considering the wider consumer redress landscape rather than simply replicating the CAT model in another field. The project will not consider whether existing substantive consumer rights, and rights of redress, are sufficient.

Work on the project is expected to start during autumn 2026, but in the meantime the Law Commission has invited stakeholders to provide their initial views by completing and returning a questionnaire by 30 October 2026. The Law Commission will then publish a consultation paper which formulates its views and proposals. 

The UK's current opt-out collective class action regime

The UK's current opt-out collective class action regime was introduced in October 2015 by way of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 amending the Competition Act 1998. 

Claims were initially slow to take off, with none being certified before the Supreme Court's landmark judgment in Mastercard Incorporated and others v Walter Hugh Merricks CBE [2020] UKSC 51 ("Merricks") (without which such proceedings cannot be brought). However since Merricks, more than 55 opt-out claims have been issued together worth tens of billions of pounds, all of which are monitored in our Collective Proceedings Tracker here.

The current opt-out regime in the CAT is limited to claims arising out of infringements of competition law, meaning it provides a mechanism for collective consumer redress only to the extent such infringements harm consumers.  However the expansion of the UK's collective class action regime into other areas of law has been on the horizon for a number of years.

Notably, during the report stage of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (the "DMCCA") in November 2023, Robert Buckland (then member of Parliament for South Swindon) proposed an amendment to the Competition Act 1998 that would have enabled collective proceedings to be brought in the CAT in respect of infringements of the consumer protections in Part 4 of the DMCCA.

Arguably, this proposed amendment had the potential of solving an issue that is perceived to hamper the current opt-out regime, namely that it encourages collective consumer law claims to be artificially re-formulated as competition law claims in order for them to be brought.  

Reflections

The timing of the Law Commission's announcement is noteworthy, as it comes after the Department for Business and Trade's call for evidence for its review of the opt-out collective actions regime closed in October 2025, but before the implementation of any of the recommendations made by the Civil Justice Council in its Final Report on litigation funding on 2 June 2025 (see our article here). It will be interesting to see how the Law Commission reacts to any further developments in those areas.

Looking ahead to the publication of the Law Commission's consultation paper, it will be interesting to see whether it makes any provisional recommendation that a new specialist tribunal be established to deal with consumer class actions, or whether it simply proposes an extension of the CAT's current jurisdiction.

Whatever the outcome of the Law Commission's review, however, it is clear that those that are experienced in dealing with collective competition class actions are going to be best positioned to deal with any new species of collective class action that emerges in the UK.