The vet bill reckoning is overdue - but doesn't go far enough, writes Dean Dunham

The bill arrives, the figures are eye-watering and yet, with a sick animal in front of you, you are not in any position to negotiate, compare, or walk away. Informed consent, that cornerstone of any fair transaction, barely gets a look-in. You pay, and you move on.

So when the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) finally concluded that the system isn't working, it didn't feel like a revelation. It felt like an institution catching up with what consumers have known for years.

The CMA's findings deserve to be stated plainly: veterinary prices have risen by more than 60 per cent in recent years, far outpacing inflation, and pet owners are routinely left without meaningful information about what they are paying for or why. The issue here is not simply cost, it is the systematic absence of transparency, and that distinction matters enormously from a consumer law perspective. A market cannot function fairly if the people within it cannot make informed choices.

The structural backdrop makes this worse. What appears on the high street as a patchwork of independent local practices is, in reality, a sector increasingly dominated by a small number of large corporate groups. Most consumers are entirely unaware of this consolidation. They walk through a familiar door, assume they are dealing with an independent practitioner, and proceed accordingly. That assumption is, in many cases, wrong, and the market has never been required to correct it.

This goes to the heart of why competition law exists. Competition only delivers its promised benefits when consumers know they have a genuine choice. Where that knowledge is absent, whether through opacity, inertia, or structural complexity, the theoretical benefits of a competitive market simply do not materialise in practice.

The CMA's proposed remedies: mandatory price publication, disclosure of ownership structures, caps on prescription fees, and the introduction of comparison tools, are, on their face, entirely proportionate. These are not radical interventions. They are the kind of basic consumer protections that have long been standard in financial services, utilities, and healthcare. That they are being described as the biggest shake-up of the veterinary sector in decades says rather more about how little scrutiny the sector has faced than about how ambitious the reforms actually are.

That said, proportionality cuts both ways. It is too simplistic to frame this as a story of corporate greed versus blameless consumers. Veterinary practices, including the independents, are themselves operating under real pressure: rising staffing costs, increasingly complex treatments, and growing demand. There are legitimate concerns within the profession that regulatory compliance costs could fall disproportionately on smaller practices, paradoxically accelerating the very consolidation the CMA is trying to address. Any regulatory intervention that burdens the market's smaller participants more heavily than its largest risks achieving precisely the opposite of its stated aim.

These are not reasons to abandon reform. They are reasons to design it carefully.

Because the underlying case for intervention remains compelling. The CMA did not launch this investigation on a whim. It followed tens of thousands of complaints from pet owners who felt overcharged, under-informed, and without meaningful recourse. That volume of public concern is, in itself, significant evidence of market failure, and regulators are right to take it seriously.

What is sometimes lost in the policy debate, however, is that this is ultimately a question of trust rather than economics. When a person takes an animal they love to a vet, they are placing considerable faith in that professional, faith that the advice they receive is clinically driven, that the fees they are charged are fair, and that the system they are navigating has their interests somewhere near its centre. Where pricing structures are opaque and ownership is undisclosed, that faith cannot be rationally placed. Years of practice as a lawyer have taught me that a professional relationship that cannot be trusted has already failed, whatever the outcomes.

Reform is therefore necessary, but it must be substantive. Price lists and comparison websites are a start, not a solution. If the government's ambition is genuinely to fix this market, it needs to restore not just affordability but also confidence: confidence that the advice given is independent, that the fee charged is justified, and that the regulatory framework governing it all has teeth.

Because when your dog is in pain, or your cat is unwell, and your choices feel impossibly constrained, you are not looking for a comparison website. You are looking for a system you can trust.

Until that trust is rebuilt, structurally, not just rhetorically, no package of reforms will feel adequate and frankly, nor should it.

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Dean Dunham KC presents LBC's legal hour every Sunday from 8pm-9pm.

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