The CMA's Veterinary Market Investigation: What It Found

Consolidation at a Scale the Regulator Found Striking

The Competition and Markets Authority launched a market investigation into the UK veterinary sector in May 2024, exercising statutory powers under the Enterprise Act 2002. The inquiry's focus was the provision of veterinary services to owners of small animals — the segment directly relevant to registered pedigree dogs and their breeders.

The CMA's published provisional findings, released in autumn 2025, documented a degree of corporate concentration that the authority regarded as a central structural fact. Six large groups — including CVS, Medivet, IVC Evidensia, Pets at Home's Vets4Pets, and VetPartners — were found to account for roughly half of all veterinary practice sites in the UK. The pace of acquisition had been rapid: the number of practices owned by the largest groups had increased substantially over the preceding decade, with the investigation identifying more than 1,500 merger events since the sector first attracted significant private-equity capital. At the local level, the CMA found many areas where a single group controlled a majority of nearby practices, limiting the effective choice available to pet owners regardless of the overall national picture.

The authority was explicit that consolidation is not inherently harmful, but concluded that the specific conditions created by this consolidation — combined with information asymmetries and structural features of how services are sold — had produced outcomes it considered adverse to consumers.

What the Report Said About Pricing and Prescriptions

The CMA identified two overlapping problems in how veterinary services are marketed and priced. The first was transparency: consumers were found to lack reliable means of comparing fees before committing to a practice or a treatment. Unlike most regulated professional services, veterinary fees are not subject to mandatory disclosure requirements, and the investigation found that practices varied significantly in how clearly consultation charges, drug markups and referral costs were communicated. The CMA proposed a remedy requiring practices to publish standardised pricing information, including for a defined basket of common services.

The second, and more contested, concern was access to written prescriptions. Veterinary surgeons in the UK are legally entitled to issue a written prescription for a prescription-only medicine (POM-V), enabling an owner to obtain that medicine from an independent pharmacy rather than from the practice directly. The CMA found that this right was inconsistently exercised and poorly communicated: a substantial share of owners were unaware they could request a written prescription, and practice-level prescription charges sometimes exceeded the savings achievable by going elsewhere. Practices owned by the larger groups were found, in some cases, to generate a significant proportion of revenue from in-house dispensing, creating a structural incentive to retain that business.

The authority's proposed remedies included a requirement to proactively inform clients of the right to a written prescription — at the point any POM-V medicine is prescribed — and caps or transparency requirements on the fees charged for producing such a prescription. The CMA also called for the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons to strengthen its standards on this disclosure as a professional conduct matter.

What the Investigation Did Not Resolve

The investigation did not find evidence of price-fixing between corporate groups, and the CMA stopped short of recommending structural remedies such as enforced divestiture — a more drastic intervention available under the Enterprise Act. The provisional findings acknowledged that increased group ownership had in some contexts enabled investment in specialist equipment and out-of-hours provision that smaller independent practices could not sustain.

The inquiry also sat alongside, rather than engaging directly with, the specific pressures documented in the pedigree sector: the elevated health-monitoring costs that owners of breeds subject to mandatory screening programmes — hip scoring, BOAS grading, MRI protocols — face as recurring expenditure rather than emergency costs. The screening requirements themselves come from schemes run by the BVA and the Kennel Club, but the fees vets charge for carrying them out are veterinary prices, and the CMA's inquiry did not examine them specifically.

A 2024 statutory inquiry exposed a UK veterinary market shaped by rapid corporate consolidation, opaque pricing and restricted access to prescription medicines — and proposed remedies that would alter how millions of pet owners interact with the profession

Final remedies were still subject to consultation at the time of publication. The authority's statutory deadline for its final report was set at August 2025, making this one of the most consequential pending decisions for the UK pet-services market.