Â鶹Éç

Available for over a year

Home swaps, driving your neighbour’s car, private car parking in your drive, even renting your neighbour’s clothes. They are all part of a new style of collaborative enterprise in which nearly everyone can join and (maybe) make money - the ‘shared economy’. It is breaking cover, growing fast and could be important. Perhaps the best known example is Airbnb but many more companies have sprung up allowing people to share their things and even their time. And now companies are trying to make money out of what makes all this sharing possible - trust. But existing regulations and laws are set up for traditional businesses such as hotels and car hire companies, and that is causing problems. Peter Day investigates the opportunities and snags of the sharing economy and asks if it could become a big democratic movement.