Excluded Spaces of Regulation: Car-Boot Sales as an Enterprise Culture out of Control?

We are concerned at one level in this paper with the debate over car-boot sales and their regulation. At another we are concerned with making connections between this and broader debates on retail regulation. After outlining briefly the literature on retail regulation, we argue that this work could benefit from thinking about spaces of exchange which are not dominated by ‘big’ retail capital. Car-boot sales represent one such space. We proceed by charting briefly the growth of the car-boot-sale phenomenon in Britain before going on to examine in detail the content of this debate, in which car-boot sales are represented as an enterprise culture out of control, as highly successful, characterised by a cast of petty criminals, and in desperate need of tighter regulation. In the remainder of the paper we argue that this representation, although it touches base with certain facets of car-boot sales, serves to legitimate the case for greater car-boot-sale regulation, and is intrinsically linked to political debate over deregulation and contracting out, particularly to the current monopolistic market operating environments enjoyed by many metropolitan authorities. We show that, although problematic to implement, the current regulatory environment is one which allows many local authorities both to exclude car-boot-sale operators from their area, and to exert a degree of control over their activities. Drawing on a number of case-study examples, we show that many local authorities have been exceedingly proactive in car-boot-sale regulation—using market law, planning law, partnerships, and ‘the market’ to control car-boot-sale operations. We then return to debates over retail regulation, maintaining that although this literature offers some conceptual purchase on the debate over car-boot-sale regulation, it has notable and important lacunae, particularly in terms of the conceptualisation of regulatory power. Moreover, we argue that the same literature would benefit from engaging with debates over exclusion and displacement: we argue here that the debate over car-boot-sale regulation needs to be interpreted more broadly as yet another instance of excluding ‘undesirable others' from certain spaces and spheres of exchange, and that such ideas could usefully be applied within the arena of conventional retail spaces.