Telecoms loyalty penalty class action: the 1 July 2026 CMC and non-parties
In short: The telecoms loyalty penalty class action against Vodafone, EE/BT, Three and O2 was certified by the Competition Appeal Tribunal on 14 November 2025 in its Certification and Limitation Judgment. Certification is procedural and does not validate the pleaded abuse theory. The post-certification CMC listed for 1 July 2026 will address procedural directions. Non-defendant mobile operators have a window to review out-of-contract pricing and Ofcom GC C1 best-tariff communications.
Any UK mobile operator with comparable handset-and-airtime contracts that continues to charge customers the full bundled monthly price after the minimum term has ended now has a clearer view of the legal risk attached to that practice. The telecoms loyalty penalty class action brought by Justin Gutmann against Vodafone, EE/BT, Three and O2 was certified by the Competition Appeal Tribunal on 14 November 2025, and the first post-certification case management conference is listed for 1 July 2026. The four sets of collective proceedings will set the procedural and evidential template for any later loyalty-penalty challenge in the retail mobile market, with analogous regulatory and litigation-risk context for broadband providers operating under the same GC C1 framework.
What is Ofcom GC C1?
GC C1 is Ofcom’s General Condition C1, one of the General Conditions of Entitlement made under section 45 of the Communications Act 2003. It binds providers of public electronic communications services within its scope. C1 covers pre-contract information, the Contract Summary, in-contract price-change information (with inflation-linked rises banned in contracts entered into from 17 January 2025), end-of-contract notifications between 10 and 40 days before the minimum term expires, and annual best-tariff information. The end-of-contract notification and best-tariff obligations have been in force since 15 February 2020 and are the part of the framework engaged by the loyalty-penalty argument.
How the telecoms loyalty penalty class action reached certification
The four sets of proceedings (case numbers 1624, 1625, 1626 and 1627/7/7/23) are brought under section 47B of the Competition Act 1998, the opt-out collective proceedings regime introduced by Schedule 8 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 with effect from 1 October 2015. They allege abuse of dominance under Chapter II of the 1998 Act, on the basis that each defendant continued to charge the full bundled handset-and-airtime price to customers whose minimum term had expired, rather than dropping the price to reflect the handset element being paid off.
Pre-certification reporting put the claims at more than 28 million current and historic mobile contracts, with aggregate damages estimated at over £3 billion. Both figures predate the 1 October 2015 limitation cut-off and will be recalibrated against the certified relevant period. The Tribunal granted the four CPO applications in its Certification and Limitation judgment of 14 November 2025, with formal CPOs following. The Tribunal struck out claims before 1 October 2015 on limitation grounds and refused the defendants’ further strike-out and reverse summary judgment applications for the period from 1 October 2015 to 8 March 2017. The certified relevant period under the Vodafone CPO runs from 1 October 2015 to 31 March 2025, with comparable bounds in the other CPOs. The judgment is procedural; it does not validate the pleaded abuse theory.
What the 1 July 2026 case management conference is expected to address
A post-certification CMC is a procedural directions hearing, not a hearing on the substantive Chapter II case. The directions the Tribunal is expected to address on 1 July 2026 typically fall into three groups.
The first is disclosure. The certification judgment fixes the class definition and the limitation period, but it does not fix the categories of pricing data, customer-journey records and end-of-contract notification logs that the defendants will have to give up. The disclosure perimeter determines what enters the public domain through the litigation, and the Tribunal typically settles that perimeter at the post-CPO directions stage rather than at trial.
The second is expert evidence. A telecoms loyalty penalty class action of this shape turns on a counterfactual price. What would a competitive retail market have charged an out-of-contract customer once the handset element of the bundled tariff was paid off? Whether a single joint expert answers that question, or competing experts in economics and consumer behaviour answer it, and on what data set, is a CMC question, not a trial question.
The third is the timetable to trial. The Tribunal’s directions will fix when witness statements fall due, when the parties exchange expert reports, and when the trial window opens. Multi-year trial timetables are common in CAT collective proceedings; the specific window will turn on the Tribunal’s directions in this case. The Tribunal itself is not a sectoral competition regulator. Ofcom and the CMA hold concurrent Chapter II enforcement powers in communications under section 371 of the Communications Act 2003 and the Competition Act 1998 (Concurrency) Regulations 2014. A final CAT judgment in the Gutmann claims may inform later concurrent enforcement and claimant strategy, but it will not automatically bind Ofcom or the CMA in a separate investigation involving non-parties.
Telecoms loyalty penalty class action exposure for non-defendant operators
Most operators are not named in the four sets of proceedings. The certification, the disclosure orders and the eventual judgment will nonetheless set the template for non-defendant exposure. The reasons are three.
First, the pleaded conduct theory is not unique to the four defendants. Any UK mobile operator with a comparable bundled handset-and-airtime tariff that continues at the original monthly price after the minimum term faces the same Chapter II argument in any future telecoms loyalty penalty class action, provided it is dominant in the relevant market. Dominance is fact-sensitive and not every MVNO meets the threshold. Broadband providers are not within the certified claim, but face analogous regulatory and litigation-risk context under the same out-of-contract pricing line of policy work.
Second, the Ofcom General Conditions apply to every public electronic communications service provider, dominant or not. The end-of-contract notification and best-tariff information obligations introduced under Ofcom GC C1 from 15 February 2020, and addressed in the January 2025 GC C1 guidance, bind every provider within their scope. Ofcom retains its standard enforcement powers under sections 94 to 105 of the Communications Act 2003 where compliance slips.
Third, the voluntary Fairness Commitments signed in 2019 covered the largest twelve retail providers and remain part of the regulatory backdrop. Where an operator gave a commitment on out-of-contract pricing and the commitment is not being met, that gap is harder to defend in any later regulatory or competition-law challenge. For non-defendant operators, the Gutmann trial is a precedent risk rather than a discrete event happening to four named parties.
Three operational steps to take now
The window between the 1 July CMC and trial gives non-defendant operators time to move from waiting to acting.
Review the out-of-contract pricing journey first. Map the points at which a customer transitions from in-contract to out-of-contract status and the communications sent at each step. Test the end-of-contract notification against the 10-to-40-day expectation in Ofcom’s GC C1 guidance and the best-tariff disclosure obligation. Record what the headline monthly price actually does at the end of the minimum term and, separately, what an equivalent SIM-only or unbundled tariff would charge.
Check contractual indemnities and notification triggers second. Wholesale agreements, MVNO host arrangements and brand-licensing deals routinely contain consumer-protection warranties and indemnities that bite on a competition-law finding. A successful telecoms loyalty penalty class action against a host network operator may engage downstream notification, audit and indemnity rights for MVNOs and resellers; the same architecture engages the host where the finding falls on the wholesale customer instead. On the buy side of telecoms M&A, the same check belongs in regulatory due diligence.
Scope a counterfactual price analysis third. The directions the Tribunal makes at the CMC are likely to shape the methodology that any future loyalty-penalty challenge has to engage with. An operator that can produce a defensible counterfactual price analysis now sits in a stronger position than one that has to build it under disclosure pressure. If a Chapter II issue does crystallise, the firm’s investigations and enforcement support page sets out the route to engage with Ofcom or the CMA.
Viewpoint
The months between certification and trial are the most productive window for compliance work. Disclosure has not yet bitten, the procedural template is not yet locked, and the regulator has not yet been asked to take a concurrent view. The four sets of Gutmann proceedings will run in public before the Tribunal from 1 July 2026 onwards, and the certification judgment makes clear that the Tribunal is willing to engage with abuse-of-dominance theories in retail mobile pricing. GC C1 and Chapter II have always applied in parallel: GC C1 to transparency and contract terms, Chapter II to abuse of dominance. The certification judgment does not validate the pleaded abuse theory; it holds that the claims are suitable to proceed as collective proceedings. The procedural shift in this telecoms loyalty penalty class action is real: the Tribunal has shown it will take a Chapter II collective claim on retail mobile pricing forward, where the working assumption had been that out-of-contract pricing would be addressed through GC C1 enforcement.
For advice on the telecoms loyalty penalty class action, on out-of-contract pricing reviews under Ofcom GC C1 and on contractual indemnity positions across MVNO and wholesale arrangements, contact Rob Bratby at Bratby Law.
