Charities and Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024

At Mills & Reeve, we are blessed to have a formidable team of lawyers working across all disciplines. Never has this been more useful than in the case of the Digital Markets Competition and Consumers Act 2024 (DMCC). A cross-disciplinary team has put their minds together to assess the impact of DMCC on charities.

Here are the key takeaways that all charities need to know about: 

Subscriptions

A raft of rules is expected in April 2026 to make subscription contracts fairer and more transparent. Consumers must be sent pre and end of contract information and notices, renewal reminders, have easy termination mechanisms and cooling off periods. Failure to comply with be enforced by a much-strengthened Competition and Markets Authority, with GDPR style fines of up to 10% of turnover. More information on the new enforcement powers in this blog.  

Some arrangements by charities are potentially caught by the new subscription regime - especially when subscribers get something for their money. Many charity membership arrangements are likely to come under these rules. We also consider arrangements such as a subscription/direct debit arrangement sponsoring a child/guide dog/giraffe with regular reports probably will be caught. 

Although these changes are a way away, now is the time to start reviewing your subscription procedures. We strongly recommend seeking professional advice to ensure compliance. 

A serious consequence of these new rights to terminate could be the loss of gift aid – but we have been assured in Parliament that the government will update the gift aid rules to make sure charities can continue benefitting from gift aid on membership subscriptions.

Reviews

For charities with shops or other services which carry reviews, new rules are coming into force on 6 April. These rules ban a series of commercial practices relating to reviews including publishing or commissioning fake or incentivised reviews which conceal they are incentivised. 

The brilliant Katrina Anderson explains these new rules in this blog.

Competition

Not something you think of when it comes to charities, but according to our team of competition lawyers in M&R, charities can come a cropper, especially trade associations. Nicola Holmes has written this article showing how important it is to stay the right side of competition law, which is being updated by the DMCC, again with almighty fines for those who mess up: Hot topics in competition law: Risks and issues in labour markets.

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