Amelia Fletcher: Competition, Creativity and the Economist Who Rocks

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Amelia Fletcher: Competition, Creativity and the Economist Who Rocks

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Amelia Fletcher is almost certainly unique in British public life: a highly regarded competition economist who has spent decades at the centre of some of the biggest questions about how markets work, while simultaneously sustaining a serious and still-active career in music. In this episode she talks to Paul Johnson and Michael Kell about both — how she ended up in economics almost by accident, what competition policy actually does and why it matters, and what it means to have kept two very different creative lives running in parallel for forty years. The career in brief Amelia studied PPE at Oxford having done science A-levels and stumbled into economics almost by elimination — she liked the idea of philosophy and politics, turned out to be good at the economics, and ended up too qualified not to pursue it. After a PhD supervised by John Vickers, she moved into economic consulting, then joined the Office of Fair Trading as Chief Economist — a role she held for twelve years as the OFT became the Competition and Markets Authority. She is now a professor at the University of East Anglia, sits on various regulatory boards, and has been closely involved in shaping the UK and EU's approach to regulating digital markets. Alongside all of this, she has fronted a succession of indie bands since her first year at Oxford — most recently finding a new generation of listeners via TikTok, with her band Heavenly currently attracting around 430,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. On the music — dialling up the rock star The episode opens with Michael pressing Amelia to set aside her modesty and give full credit to her musical career. She obliges, up to a point. Her first band, Talulah Gosh, formed in her first year at Oxford, was offered a major label deal — which she turned down rather than leave university, thereby setting the template for the next four decades. Her doctorate-era band Heavenly became associated with the Riot Grrrl scene, and it is that catalogue that is now finding a new audience online. Her most rock-and-roll moment? Playing a white stadium in Spain with the entire audience singing along. She has never thrown a television out of a window. "I've been quite an economist-y sort of rock star," she says. On what competition policy actually does Amelia gives one of the clearest explanations in the series of why an economic institution that most people have never heard of shapes almost everything about daily life. The OFT and its successor the CMA exist to make markets work well for consumers — through competition enforcement, merger scrutiny, and consumer protection. She illustrates the point with two concrete examples: the long campaign against unauthorised overdraft fees, which took a Supreme Court defeat and years of regulatory pressure before the practice was effectively ended; and a cartel case against around 120 building companies who had been colluding on bids for public works. On the Facebook-Instagram merger One of the episode's most striking moments is Amelia's frank admission that the OFT cleared the Facebook acquisition of Instagram at phase one — when Instagram had around ten employees, almost no revenue, and looked like a photo filter app. She calls it straightforwardly: "That is seen as having been a highly problematic merger that we should have looked at in a lot more detail. That's my bad. I learned." On digital markets and the Furman Review A substantial part of the episode covers Amelia's work on the regulation of big tech. She was a member of the Furman panel — commissioned by the Treasury to examine competition in digital markets — which concluded that competition law alone was insufficient to address the dominance of Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook, and recommended a new regime of pro-competitive regulation. She explains clearly what makes digital markets structurally different: massive economies of scale, powerful network effects, the centrality of data as both input and output, and the ecosystem lock-in that makes it almost impossible for rivals to compete even with better products. The EU's Digital Markets Act and the CMA's new digital markets powers are the direct descendants of that work. On the CMA and growth Amelia pushes back — carefully but clearly — on the current government's pressure on the CMA to be more permissive about mergers in the name of growth. Competition, she argues, is generally what drives growth, not what impedes it. She is equally clear that the CMA can be outgunned politically — large companies can spend far more on lobbying than a public authority can resist — but that on the economics, the CMA's staff are remarkably good, motivated by genuine belief in what they're doing rather than salary. On economics and music — are they really so different? Paul frames the two sides of Amelia's life as almost diametrically opposed — economics as structure and logic, music as emotion and creativity. Amelia pushes back on ...

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