Pet owners could continue to be kept in the dark about who owns their local veterinary practice after the Competition and Markets Authority weakened proposed transparency rules for Britain’s increasingly monopolised veterinary industry.
The regulator recently investigated the £6.3bn veterinary market and concluded that it was “not fit for purpose”. Large veterinary groups charge pet owners an average of 16.6 percent more than independent practices, while corporate ownership is frequently concealed behind familiar local names.
More than 60 percent of veterinary practices are now owned wholly or partly by just six groups: CVS, Pets at Home, Medivet, IVC, VetPartners and Linnaeus. Several are controlled by private equity investors, while Linnaeus belongs to Mars Petcare, itself a subsidiary of the US confectionery giant Mars.
This concentration isn’t an accidental distortion of an otherwise healthy market. Competition under capitalism constantly produces its opposite: monopoly. Larger firms use their access to capital to swallow smaller competitors, centralise ownership and increase their power over workers and customers. The local name may remain above the door, but the income ultimately flows towards a small number of corporate owners and international investors.
Pet healthcare is especially attractive to capital because owners can’t simply treat veterinary care as an optional purchase when an animal is sick or injured. The emotional bond between people and their pets becomes another opportunity for profit. When urgent care is needed, the supposed freedom of the consumer to shop around means very little.
Following its investigation, the CMA and ministers proposed capping prescription fees at £21 and requiring practices to be more transparent about their ownership. Its original wording said practices would have to identify their “corporate vet group”.
That language has since been softened to “network or group”. Under the revised proposal, corporations could display the name of a subsidiary, brand or former independent practice instead of identifying the conglomerate which ultimately controls it.
The Progressive Veterinary Association, a group of veterinary workers, has threatened the CMA with judicial review over the change.
Dr Iain McGill, a director of the PVA, said: “This is bad news for pet-owners and their animals. Ultimately, large corporations would be allowed to hide the fact that they are the ultimate controller of local vet practices and operate behind sometimes misleading brand names.
“Where they have a choice, pet owners often prefer independent practices, which the CMA found, on average, to be cheaper than corporate practices. It would be good to hear from prime minister Andy Burnham that he is on the side of small British-owned businesses rather than often foreign private equity and corporate investors.”
The problem isn’t that this capital is foreign. British finance capital is no less driven to extract profit than American or European finance capital. The problem is that ownership has been concentrated in the hands of large corporate groups whose decisions are governed by returns to investors. A neighbourhood practice can retain its familiar local name while its prices, working conditions and services are shaped by distant owners with no interest in veterinary care beyond its profitability.
The CMA has argued that naming ultimate parent companies might provide little meaningful benefit because their corporate names may be unfamiliar to pet owners. This turns reality on its head. Those names are unfamiliar precisely because corporations have been allowed to hide behind local brands.
The PVA responded: “The suggestion that accurate corporate ownership information may provide no meaningful benefit to pet owners perhaps rather underestimates the intelligence of the average pet owner. Knowing full ownership information is necessary so that pet owners can make an informed choice. Lack of informed market choices is likely to lead to less competition and pet owner detriment.”
Transparency alone wouldn’t break corporate control of veterinary care. Nor would replacing multinational owners with smaller British capitalists remove the pressure to generate profit from sick animals and worried owners. But concealing ownership deprives people of even the limited choice available within the existing market.
This episode captures the real character of capitalist regulation. The state investigates an industry, confirms that monopoly ownership is producing higher prices and misleading customers, and then rewrites its proposed rules so the monopolies can preserve their local disguises. Pet owners are presented with a row of apparently independent practices while the money flows back to the same handful of corporate centres.
That isn’t the free market going wrong. It’s capitalist competition developing exactly as Marxists have long explained: towards concentration, monopoly and the growing power of finance capital over every part of social life.
