Competition class actions: First case to go to trial ends in failure

In a judgment handed down just before Christmas, the UK Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) unanimously dismissed a claim for over £1bn in damages on behalf of over 3.7 million BT customers, which was the first opt-out collective competition claim to proceed to trial: Le Patourel v BT Group. 

The class representative alleged that the class had suffered loss as a result of unfair pricing of residential telephone landline services by UK telecoms operator BT. The claim followed and relied heavily on provisional findings made by the UK telecoms sector regulator Ofcom in 2017 in a review of the market for standalone landline telephone services, and the subsequent decision by Ofcom to accept voluntary undertakings from BT to address its concerns about BT's pricing in the standalone telephone services market, namely a price cut for standalone telephone landline services.

The CAT concluded that although the evidence indicated that the prices charged by BT were excessive (by reference to a notional competitive benchmark), they were not unfair because they bore a reasonable relation to the economic value of the services provided. On that basis, the CAT concluded that there was no abuse of dominance, and BT was not liable to pay any damages.

For more information on this important judgment, see this post on our Competition Notes blog.

Note: Permission to appeal was refused on 1 August 2025.