The price that was never available

How we work

Why the total goes first

Since April 2025 the rules on unfair commercial practices have been contained in the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, and among the clearest of them is the requirement that an invitation to purchase state the total price inclusive of any tax, fee, charge or levy which the consumer cannot avoid paying. Where a price genuinely cannot be calculated in advance, the manner of its calculation must be given instead. The target is a practice familiar to anyone who has booked anything online: a figure shown at the start, followed by a booking fee, a compulsory service charge and an administration fee revealed one screen at a time, so that the number which attracted the customer was never one they could have paid.

What makes the rule effective is less the prohibition than the enforcement behind it. The competition authority now has direct enforcement powers over these provisions, including the power to impose financial penalties calculated by reference to worldwide turnover. Compliance has therefore stopped being a question of civil exposure between a trader and an individual customer, which was always easy to absorb, and become a question of regulatory risk, which is not. The same shift applies to the review provisions: writing false reviews, commissioning someone else to write them, misrepresenting reviews or social endorsements, and stating that reviews come from consumers who actually bought the product without taking reasonable and proportionate steps to check, are all prohibited outright rather than weighed case by case.

In practice both reduce to the same discipline, which is not presenting something as other than it is. If a charge is unavoidable, it belongs in the first number. If an extra is genuinely optional, it is offered unticked rather than pre-selected and quietly carried through a checkout. If a review was not written by a customer, it does not appear, and if a customer wrote an unflattering one, it stays. On the media side the same principle governs: where advertising space is sold or arranged on behalf of another party, the commercial nature of the resulting communication has to be identifiable to the person receiving it, and paid promotion is not presented as independent editorial. One last piece of the same instinct: this company traded as UK News and Media Group Limited until July 2025, which is on the public register and is therefore better mentioned than discovered.