Three pounds was the size of the booking fee the AA and BSM driving schools left out of their headline prices between April and December 2025. In April this year the Competition and Markets Authority fined the AA £4.2 million for it and ordered refunds of more than £760,000 to over 80,000 learner drivers. Work that out per pound of fee and you get a number that should make any finance director sit up.
It was the first financial penalty the CMA has imposed using the direct enforcement powers it acquired in April 2025. It will not be the last.
The case for showing your workings
Every business that sells anything makes a choice about price. You can show the customer the parts, or you can show them the whole. In 1998, Vicki Morwitz, Eric Greenleaf and Eric Johnson published a paper in the Journal of Marketing Research with the excellent title Divide and Prosper. They found that when a price is split into a base and a surcharge, buyers anchor on the base, underprocess the surcharge, and walk away recalling a lower total than they paid. Partitioned pricing, they called it. Demand went up. Ryanair went on to build most of a business model on it.
Itemising also feels honest, which is the joke sitting at the centre of all this. An invoice with fourteen lines on it looks like a firm with nothing to hide. And when the components are things a buyer can choose between, seat or no seat, insurance or no insurance, it really is more honest, because it lets people buy less.
The trouble is that the trick has a half-life. Later research found the reverse effect in plenty of conditions: once a surcharge gets large enough to notice, or arbitrary enough to resent, all-inclusive prices are judged more favourably than partitioned ones. Anyone who has bought a gig ticket and watched a £14 “service charge” on the final screen knows the feeling.
The case for hiding them
Bundling does one thing itemising cannot. It removes the arithmetic.
A single number is a single decision. Fourteen numbers are fourteen small opportunities for a customer to hesitate, compare, or discover that you charge £40 for something they had assumed was included.
Medical travel is the purest version currently operating. Patients priced out of private dentistry at home now shop a market where clinics quote full mouth dental implants Turkey package deals as one figure. The buyer cannot separate the dentistry from the minibreak, and that is the intention. One number, one decision, no arithmetic.
The same market, running both models
What makes dentistry such a useful natural experiment is that Britain already runs both systems side by side, in the same buildings, frequently on the same patients.
NHS dentistry in England is a bundle. Since April 2026 there have been three charges: £27.90, £76.60 and £332.10. Cross the corridor into private care and the model inverts. Everything becomes a line. A zirconia crown is quoted, fitted and invoiced as its own unit at its own price, with consultation and imaging charged separately.
Patients tend to describe the private version as expensive, which is usually true, and the NHS version as good value, which is sometimes not. One small filling inside a Band 2 charge is worse value than the same filling itemised at sixty quid.
The regulator now has an opinion
Under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, in force since 6 April 2025, firms must show the total price, inclusive of every mandatory fee, in any invitation to purchase. The CMA’s price transparency guidance, published in November 2025, goes further than most people realise: it treats partitioned pricing, meaning listing the components without adding them up for the customer, as insufficient on its own. Showing your workings is no longer a defence. You have to show the answer.
Enforcement is on. The CMA opened investigations into eight businesses in November 2025 and posted advisory letters to a hundred more, across secondary ticketing, gyms, parking, food delivery, rail and holidays. Penalties can reach 10% of global turnover, and the regulator no longer needs a court to impose them.
So, you can still bundle as the lower-risk option, though it costs you price discovery and makes any future increase very hard to explain. You can still itemise, but only for things a customer is able to decline.
The AA’s £3 fee was never a pricing strategy. It was a habit that nobody had revisited. Most itemized invoices in this country contain at least one of those, sitting quietly in row nine, doing nothing except generating regulatory risk at a rate of roughly a million pounds a pound.
Now would be a reasonable moment to go and look.
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