Zack Polanski told BBC Breakfast on 5 July 2026 that he will pay any council tax found to be outstanding on his former houseboat — while also saying the bill could be nothing at all.

The Green Party GLA member said he could be liable for between £3,000 and £4,000 owed to Waltham Forest Council, but stressed that no decision has yet been reached. The council confirmed it is taking legal advice over what it described as "complex factors unique to moorings," meaning the question of whether any sum is formally due remains open.

Polanski's explanation turns on how marina berths are typically rated. He said he had assumed that because the marina largely pays business rates, his own residential mooring was covered by that arrangement rather than a separate council tax liability. The council, he said, had itself indicated he might owe nothing for the same reason. Working out the correct tax treatment for living on a boat, he told the BBC, is "complicated" — a position Waltham Forest's own legal caution appears to support.

The story has been running since May. The Telegraph reported on 12 May 2026 that Polanski had been referred to a standards committee over the non-payment, having lived on the houseboat for three years. Waltham Forest subsequently launched a formal investigation, and The Guardian reported on 23 May that the Greater London Authority was also considering its own inquiry. The GLA has since cleared him following a complaint.

A separate issue surfaced in May: the Green Party acknowledged that Polanski did not vote in local elections despite being registered at the east London marina, and a message in which he told Hackney mayoral candidate Zoë Garbett "you have my vote" drew scrutiny. That strand has not been formally resolved, though it is distinct from the council tax question.

The Green Party's line has been consistent: Polanski apologised, and has taken steps to settle whatever he is ultimately found to owe. That is, strictly, an offer to pay a bill that may never arrive. The political difficulty is that the uncertainty is the story — a senior Green figure, publicly associated with a politics of transparency and civic duty, went three years without paying council tax on his home, whether through a genuine misunderstanding about business rates or otherwise.

The GLA clearance limits the institutional exposure. But the reputational question — why the arrangement was never queried proactively, either by Polanski or by the party — is harder to close with a promise to pay up. Westminster parties are well practised at managing disclosures of this kind; the Green Party, which trades partly on its distance from the habits of established politics, faces a higher expectation of tidiness in its members' personal tax affairs.

The legal complexity Waltham Forest is navigating is real. Houseboat and marina taxation sits in a genuinely contested area of local government finance: the interaction between the non-domestic rating list and the council tax valuation list for residential moorings has produced litigation before. If the council concludes that business rates on the marina site do extinguish any separate residential council tax liability for individual berths, Polanski's position is vindicated on the substance. The political damage from the period of uncertainty does not evaporate with it.