Denise Kingsmill, Deputy Chair of the Competition Commission is a practitioner of the arcane art of competition law and policy. In that role she regularly chairs panels of Commission members who have to adjudicate on matters of great importance to all of us - whether the price of new cars in the United Kingdom is above the competitive level (answer – yes), whether Lloyds TSB should be allowed to take over the Abbey National (answer – no), whether a newspaper in Belfast should be taken over by a group with interests in the Republic of Ireland (answer – yes), and so forth.
These inquiries take place under the close scrutiny of the press. As a consequence Denise is often in the spotlight herself, her every word is subject to as much analysis as speeches from the Kremlin used to be of old.
In this role, she has earned a reputation as a forceful and vigorous protector of consumers and of the public interest, subjecting business executives to fair but rigorous enquiry. Her prominent role frequently gets her cited as one of the hundred, or two hundred, most important people in the country.
However, competition law was not always her métier, and she has had a varied career both inside and outside the legal profession. She was born in New Zealand, but most of her schooling was in Wales, at a Grammar School whose name I will not attempt to pronounce. She was the first pupil of that school to go to Cambridge, where she was at Girton College in the turbulent atmosphere of the mid-1960s, when students read not (as they do today) books about how to be successful entrepreneurs, but radical volumes by Mao Tse Tung and Germaine Greer.
On leaving Cambridge, she joined ICI, then one of the commanding heights of the British economy, and was offered the choice of working on paints in Slough, on chemicals in Billingham or on fibres in Knightsbridge. She chose the last and became deeply acquainted with the upper reaches of the fashion industry – an interest which has proved to be lifelong.
After a period in New York, she returned to London and became deeply involved in what had by then become a major preoccupation – the question of equal opportunities. Deciding that the best practical way to right such injustices was through the law, she undertook the grind of professional law exams - in the days (now long past, I hope for the sake of graduates here today), when students were expected to learn material by heart and reproduce it verbatim. She sat one of her final exams on the day when her son was due to be born. She then became a Trade Union lawyer, later setting up her own firm to tackle equal opportunities law.
As this was taken over by DJ Freeman, the well-known city lawyers, her work load extended to more high profile cases involving the ejection of chief executives by their boards of directors. These are classic legal negotiations in which the stakes are high, and time is short, so that tempers fray.
By all accounts, Denise was very good at this, keeping her head while all about were losing theirs – to the great benefit of certain well-known executives whose services were no longer required.
In 1997 she moved to the Competition Commission, and she has been specially prominent in seeking to make its processes transparent to the firms which are subject to inquiry as well as to the general public. As you may know, the Government has recently expressed its confidence in the Commission through proposals to make its activities more free from political intervention. In future, the inquiries which Denise chairs will produce decisions which will be put into effect, rather than recommendations to ministers. She told last week’s Sunday Times that she welcomes this role, but thinks that the Commission should now extend its accountability by doing much more of its work in public.
Her work with the Commission does not occupy all of Denise’s time. She has been a director of MFI, the well-known furniture store, and has recently been appointed to the board of TeleWest, the communications company.
She also has persistently pursued her inequality agenda. She has devoted a lot of time to health care as the chair of a large health authority. She has been outspoken about employment practices which discriminate, particularly against women. In that connection, she has recently been appointed by the Government to write a review of women’s pay and employment, proposing ways of narrowing the 18% pay gap which currently exists. She is also an enthusiastic and skilful, (or alternatively a lucky), angler, and a photograph of her and her partner appeared on the front cover of the Angling Times clutching several implausibly large salmon.
Chancellor, I present to you Denise Kingsmill for the award of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa.
LLD - July 2001
