The reform package sits on three doctrinal layers. The base layer is the Enterprise Act 2002's general merger control regime, in which Part 3 lets the Secretary of State intervene in transactions on 'public interest' grounds defined in section 58 and require parallel reports from the CMA on competition and Ofcom on media plurality and editorial standards. The 2025 Section 58 Considerations Order and the Definition of Newspaper Order operate on this base layer, recalibrating both what counts as a 'newspaper' for merger purposes and which public-interest considerations apply.
The second layer is Chapter 3A of the Enterprise Act 2002 — the Foreign State Influence regime — which took effect from 13 March 2024 and prohibits foreign-state ownership of UK newspapers and news periodicals outright 1. This is a hard prohibition rather than a discretionary test: it operates as a structural bar on transactions where a foreign state would acquire control or influence. The 2025 Regulations and the No.2 Regulations made on 18 December 2025 carve out exceptions to that prohibition — most importantly the 15% sovereign-investor threshold, a 0.1% associated-persons threshold, and a retail-investment-product carve-out [candpk=43962].
The third layer is the bespoke transactional machinery that has grown around the Telegraph sale: the January 2024 Order, successive PIINs and pre-emptive action orders made under section 42 Enterprise Act 2002, and the Secretary of State's 'three principles' statement of November 2025 2. This layer is where ministerial discretion is most concentrated, and it is the layer the Lords' Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee has been most active on, drawing the No.2 Regulations to the special attention of the House [candpk=164272].
What the regime does NOT do, on the evidence in the corpus, is broaden the Media Public Interest Test to online news creators despite Ofcom's repeated recommendation that it do so 3. The government's May 2025 consultation flagged this question and the November 2024 WMS opened a separate consultation strand on it, but neither has resulted in a substantive SI in the way the FSI strand has.