The Subsidy Control Act - Three Years On

The Subsidy Control Act 2022 came into force on 4 January 2023, after the UK left the EU and EU State aid law ceased to apply in the UK outside of the Windsor Framework.

The Act is designed to implement the UK’s international law obligations, and now governs the award of subsidies from public funds.

In this session, we discuss how the Act has operated in practice, and the lessons learned from recent judgments. These judgments have considered many different kinds of arrangements, including whether a public authority can grant a subsidy to itself, multi-million pound loans for housing developers, multi-million pound investments in marketing, and an acknowledged subsidy of some £200 million for Cardiff Airport. The session will consider how to identify when a subsidy is being given, practical issues to consider when undertaking a subsidy control assessment, what makes a subsidy unlawful, how rights under the Act can be enforced, the remedies that may follow the grant of an unlawful subsidy, and the approach of the Competition Appeal Tribunal to judicial review under the Act.