The Green Party said Zack Polanski has until recently been living on a houseboat in London, after questions were raised over whether the boat should have been treated as his main home for council tax purposes. A party spokesperson said Polanski had already taken steps to pay any tax he may be found to owe and added: “Zack apologises sincerely for the unintentional mistake.”
The boat was moored at a marina in Hackney, and the party said Polanski lived in a room he rented at a different London address where council tax was included in the rent. It said he only stayed on the boat “occasionally,” even as the issue drew closer scrutiny. That scrutiny intensified last week when The Times questioned whether he had paid council tax for the boat for the past three years.
Polanski’s situation has now been picked apart by tax lawyer Dan Neidle, who wrote this week on the Tax Policy Associates website that a boat is liable for council tax when it is used as a person’s “sole or main residence.” Neidle said that if the houseboat was Polanski’s main residence, then “Mr Polanski and his partner should have paid council tax there.”
The issue is not simply whether Polanski owned or lived on a boat, but how often it functioned as home. That distinction matters because council tax applies when a boat is used as a person’s sole or main residence, and the Green Party’s own account says he was living elsewhere in London and staying on the boat only from time to time.
There are also details that point in different directions. The Times reported seeing an advertisement to sell the boat in which Polanski’s partner wrote, “We are moving house and so will sadly be leaving the gorgeous community behind.” Separately, the paper reported that Polanski and his partner appear in recent years to have stayed on a narrowboat at a marina. A local laundrette said it had often done laundry for the pair from 2023 to 2025, while the Mail reported that Polanski had been registered to vote at a nearby building used as a postal address by several people thought to have boats in the marina.
The Green Party said it would not discuss his address publicly “for security reasons,” but the accounting question is now plain: if the boat was his home rather than an occasional stopover, council tax should have been paid there. Polanski has apologised, and the party says he has moved quickly to deal with any bill that follows. What remains unresolved is whether the past three years were a lapse over an unusual living arrangement, or a failure to treat the boat as the main residence it may have been.
