Earl Attlee – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Earl Attlee on 2016-02-01.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether the UK competition authorities have made an assessment of the UK market in printer cartridges; and if so, what conclusions were reached.

Baroness Neville-Rolfe

The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) carried out a market study in 2001 on consumer IT goods and services, including the printer cartridge market. It noted that consumers may find it difficult to identify which printer manufacturer had the cheapest price overall – this included the upfront price of the printer and the price of cartridges over the life of the machine. The OFT worked with the industry to introduce a labelling scheme which allowed consumers to identify how many pages they could expect to print with a cartridge. This allows consumers to consider both the purchase price and the running costs of the printer.

The Competition and Markets Authority took over the competition functions of the OFT in 2014.