In September 2005, fifty prominent private schools in the United Kingdom were found guilty of operating a fee-fixing cartel by the Office of Fair Trading.
[2] Emails showed that the schools were routinely swapping information about their costs and intended fee changes, as often as four to six times a year as part of a Sevenoaks' Survey.
She wrote to John Vickers, the OFT director-general, saying, "They are not a group of businessmen meeting behind closed doors to fix the price of their products to the disadvantage of the consumer.
[2] The OFT released a 500-page statement which was summed up thus: This regular and systematic exchange of confidential information as to intended fee increases was anti-competitive and resulted in parents being charged higher fees than would otherwise have been the case.However, on final publication[5] this was changed to: The Office of Fair Trading has found that the Participant schools infringed the prohibition imposed by section 2(1) of the Competition Act 1998 by participating in an agreement and/or concerted practice having as its object the prevention, restriction or distortion of competition in the relevant markets for the provision of educational services.
One of the principal aims of the negotiation was to ensure that financial payments by the schools should go to a charitable trust rather than to the Treasury: this followed a United States example where a sportswear firm had agreed to provide sports facilities in settlement of a competition law claim.