Garage Support Newsletter 7 UK 2021

News

Workshops, your industry needs you Unless MVBER is tightened and statutory bodies given the tools and teeth to enforce it, then the UK’s 30,000 independent workshops and their 350,000-strong workforce face an existential threat. Allowing MVBER to further dilute and fail would represent the advent of monopoly power in the aftermarket, reducing choice and driving up prices for consumers held to ransom. Independent garages consistently rank higher for customer satisfaction than the franchised dealers, offering a local ‘all-makes’ service at a competitive price – critically, which can be flexed depending on the parts the driver is comfortable paying for. We are working hard to lobby both the CMA and the European Commission over the future of MVBER, helping to establish the UK arm of AFCAR, the European- wide Association for the Freedom of Car Repair. This

is a federation of associations and commercial organisations formed to lobby on Block Exemption and other key issues such as telematics data access and cybersecurity. If you work in the independent aftermarket and have experience of the examples of anti- competitive behaviour I’ve mentioned here, then UKAFCAR wants to hear from you. And if your business wants to join this expanding coalition then the same applies. We hope that by presenting more and more compelling evidence of the abuse of MVBER to regulators today, we can safeguard it and improve it for tomorrow.

The growth of ‘captive’ parts This erosion is especially visible in the growth of so-called ‘captive’ parts, as more and more parts are removed from the competitive arenas created by MVBER. OEMs are designing systems and products that lock-out third parties, and this practice is especially prevalent in newer areas of technology, like electric vehicles and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). This includes practices such as developing codes or software integral to the functioning of a part, but only issued by the OEM - even if the part was developed and made by a major aftermarket supplier such as Bosch. The result is mini-monopolies – where independent garages are locked out of repairing and servicing vehicles, and where OEMs can effectively charge what they wish.

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