This only covers privately owned “boats” if you rent a kayak or a canoe or a boat the operator must have a business waterways license which will enable you to use the waterways for the duration of your rental.
Paying 48 pounds (63 USD) per year for the ability to use my cheap inflatable on the inland waterways is preposterous. That's more than four thousand US dollars added up over a lifetime.
The cheapest/shortest license I could find was a princely £9.10. Fairly frequently I've gone out for a brief little trip - an hour or so with the boat, drift down a canal, get some lunch - with my girlfriend. Now in order to do that I need to fill out a multi-page form and pay someone £9.10? Ridiculous.
Why can't it work the way it works here? We have more waterways, more people on the water, more commercial shipping, and a substantially more involved system of canals, lakes and rivers, and it's totally free to plop your little inflatable wherever you please (excluding a very small number of areas only available to commercial traffic, far from where anyone would want to be in an inflatable.)
By the way, I've been to the UK, and your waterways are disgusting - certainly worse maintained than here in the Netherlands. I've seen heroin needles, human feces, and piles of trash. Meanwhile over here we keep our waterways clean without making people pay four thousand bucks over their lifetime for something as simple as an inflatable boat. This is despite the planeloads of British tourists coming to the Netherlands to throw trash in our waterways.
The comments responding to you don't make any sense either. Needing some sort of permit to permanently moor a houseboat is totally different from having to pay to use a canoe or inflatable in the water.
In case there anyone wants to defend the UK's absolutely idiotic licenses, here's a concrete example from your neighbors about 100 miles east.
Here in the Netherlands we have a ridiculous amount of public water - canals, rivers, lakes, etc - and it's all entirely free to use. It's even free to moor your boat temporarily (up to 3 days) at thousands of spots around the country. Our population density is double, we have more people with boats, and we have a massive amount of commercial shipping traffic everywhere. We've got several of the busiest ports in Europe. One of them is as big as ten of the port of London! And somehow it works out splendidly.