The competition watchdog is struggling to attract lawyers to investigate mergers and digital markets due to significant increases in private sector salaries, its chief executive has told MPs.

Andrea Coscelli said the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is ‘constantly in a way fighting for talent’, with civil service pay unable to keep up as significant numbers of mergers and acquisitions fuel a salary war.

He told the business, energy and industrial strategy committee yesterday that funding from government has been ‘adequate’. However Coscelli added that ‘the issue … is then to convert the cash into people and it varies a bit by areas’.

The CMA has had ‘some very good applicants’ in relation to some of its expanded powers, in particular for roles in the new Office for the Internal Market and Subsidy Advice Unit, he said. ‘For mergers, antitrust and digital, it is a bit tougher because the private sector market is very hot at the moment in those areas,’ Coscelli told the committee.

‘There is very significant M&A activity and salaries for lawyers have increased very significantly. We have obviously civil service pay scales, we had a pay freeze over the last 12 months, so it is not super easy but we will try quite hard and certainly we have been reasonably successful in the expansion.

CMA

Competition and Markets Authority ‘constantly in a way fighting for talent’

‘We still carry a number of vacancies so we are kind of constantly in a way fighting for talent, so I am quite happy where we are but it is certainly a risk for the CMA going forward.’

Coscelli suggested that the CMA’s role post-Brexit may attract candidates, pointing to the fact the watchdog is currently investigating Nvidia’s planned acquisition of chip designer ARM and will ‘presumably’ look at Microsoft’s proposed takeover of computer game company Activision Blizzard.

‘These are very interesting, very meaningful cases so it is quite attractive for people to come in and in a number of cases people accept a pay cut to come into the CMA and do that,’ he said.

Coscelli added: ‘It is interesting work, it is relevant work and we are quite successful at convincing people to come, maybe in some cases just for a few years, and be on the right side of the argument and learn a lot by doing it.’