For more than two centuries, families have made their homes on Britain’s rivers and canals. Yet the law has never properly caught up with them. Boat dwellers occupy a strange limbo, both too settled to be ignored and too mobile to be protected. The Rights of Boat Dwellers Bill, which I am introducing this week, sets out to close that gap.
The 2021 Census counted 105,000 people living on boats and other mobile homes and that is almost certainly an undercount. Many never received Census information at all. Others stayed away, afraid that being counted might draw attention to a home they could lose at any moment. That fear tells you most of what you need to know about how precarious life on the water has become.
Part of the problem is structural. At least 21 navigation and other authorities manage our inland and coastal waterways, each with its own legal framework. Housing law, meanwhile, simply does not apply to boats. This means a community with a 200-year history finds itself unacknowledged by the very statutes that govern where and how it lives.
The consequences are not abstract. Consider the everyday business of being a citizen.
Boat dwellers are routinely refused GP registration for lack of a fixed address, even though NHS guidance is clear that a patient present in the catchment area can use the surgery’s own address. Some have been struck off patient lists simply for giving a ‘care of’ address, or for admitting they had moved on as the waterways authorities require them to. Children have been turned away from schools for having no postcode in the catchment area. Pensioners have been denied the bus passes they are entitled to, even though councils are reimbursed by central government for the cost.
The pattern repeats across public life. Families applying for Universal Credit are wrongly told they cannot claim help with their boat licence, despite case law confirming that they can.[1] The DVLA frequently rejects Poste Restante and ‘care of’ addresses, and few insurers will cover a vehicle not kept at a fixed address, leaving boaters exposed to prosecution for offences they have no realistic way to avoid.
Then there is the question of simply being allowed to stay. Since 2015, the Canal & River Trust has enforced a policy that pushes boaters without a permanent mooring to travel a distance and pattern that can cut them off from work, from their children’s school, from family. This goes well beyond what the British Waterways Act 1995 requires. Those who cannot comply may have their licence cut to a six-month probation. Those who ‘fail’ an undefined test of travelling ‘far enough’ risk losing their licence and, with it, their home. On Environment Agency waters, the right to moor for ‘a reasonable time’ has been reinterpreted as a flat 24 hours, despite a court ruling that what is reasonable cannot be fixed in advance.[2]
Boat dwellers with permanent moorings fare little better. They have no security of tenure at all. Mooring contracts offer scant protection, and some operators provide none in writing. A resident can be evicted for any reason, or none, too often after raising a concern about safety. Around 95% of moorings lack planning consent for residential use, leaving the people living on them perpetually one enforcement notice away from homelessness.
None of this is new to Parliament. With colleagues, and with the help of the University of York and the National Bargee Travellers Association, I worked to amend the Renters’ Rights Bill to extend security of tenure to those on permanent moorings. We did not succeed. It later emerged that the Canal & River Trust had lobbied peers and officials to have those amendments withdrawn. Its own board minutes record the candid view that giving boaters security of tenure “would have a fundamental impact” on the Trust’s ability to manage them.[3] I do not think the convenience of an authority is a good enough reason to deny people a secure home.
This is not the first time the issue has come before Parliament. It was considered in 1975, in 2005, in 2006, and again last year. Each time, boat dwellers have been told to wait. They have waited long enough.
My Bill would do something simple in principle, if overdue in practice: recognise a boat as a lawful home, with the rights and protections that any other home carries. Access to a doctor, a school place, a vote, a secure roof. These should not depend on whether that roof happens to float. Boat dwellers cannot be left to wait another fifty years for justice.
- [1]AB v London Borough of Camden (HB) [2020] UKUT 158 (AAC).
- [2]Moore v British Waterways Board [2013] EWCA Civ 73, para 63.
- [3]Canal & River Trust Board of Trustees, minutes of 25 September 2025 (published March 2026).