Primary source(s): Competition Appeal Tribunal CPO judgment, Case No. 1698/7/7/24 (13 October 2025); CAT public diary listing (hearing 23–24 September 2026).
Police forces, fire brigades, ambulance trusts, the RNLI and the RSPCA are, collectively, suing Motorola for roughly £650m. The party bankrolling the fight is not a hedge fund or a litigation financier. It is the Home Office.
The claim, brought before the Competition Appeal Tribunal by Clare Spottiswoode CBE, a former energy regulator, targets Motorola’s handling of Airwave, the radio network that has kept emergency services talking to each other since the early 2000s. Airwave was meant to be switched off years ago and replaced by the newer Emergency Services Network, a project that has faced repeated delay. While that switchover dragged on, Motorola kept running Airwave and, according to a Competition and Markets Authority investigation, kept charging prices well above what a competitive market would bear. The CMA imposed a price cap in August 2023. The claim now before the tribunal seeks to recover what was overpaid before that cap arrived.
This is a competition claim, brought as opt-out collective proceedings, the nearest thing English law has to a US-style class action. Opt-out means every affected purchaser is automatically part of the claim unless they choose to leave it, which matters here because many of the buyers are small rural fire services or charities that would never individually justify suing a multinational telecoms group, however real their loss. Bundling them together is the only way the claim gets made at all.
What makes this case unusual, even by the standards of an already unusual corner of law, is who is paying for it. Third-party litigation funders back most collective claims of this size, taking a cut of any damages to cover the legal risk. Here, the Home Office itself is funding Spottiswoode’s claim, the first time a publicly funded body has backed an opt-out competition claim of this kind. It is not hard to see why: the government commissioned Airwave, complained about its pricing to the CMA in the first place, and would ultimately benefit if public bodies recover money that came out of public budgets.
The tribunal certified the case to proceed on an opt-out basis a year ago, rejecting Motorola’s argument that the class was too broad and should instead require claimants to actively sign up. Spottiswoode’s advisory panel includes Sir Gerald Barling, a former president of the tribunal itself, alongside figures from the emergency services sector, brought in partly to reassure smaller class members that a claim run largely on their behalf will not quietly favour the biggest players in the room. This week, the tribunal sits again for a further hearing, the unglamorous, procedural kind that rarely makes headlines but quietly decides how fast a claim of this size actually reaches trial, currently expected no earlier than 2027.
Nobody who dialled 999 during the overcharge period noticed anything. The call still connected, the ambulance still came, the fire engine still turned up. The bill for keeping that network running is still being argued over in a tribunal room, years after the events in question and years before anyone actually gets paid.
Author: Eric Sinclair
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