‘My home is a flood risk — no insurer would touch me’

When Tracy Bennett bought her £225,000 home in 2015, she knew it was at risk of flooding. But it was only once she had moved in that she realised it was uninsurable.
Bennett, 62, lives in Abbeyfields mobile home park beside the River Thames in Chertsey, Surrey. It was only after the sale was complete that she found out that the garden had flooded in 2014, the owner’s car had been submerged and the water had come within inches of the 4ft-high decking on which her home is built.
“If I had seen the pictures before buying the house, I wouldn’t have touched it with a barge pole,” said Bennett, who is retired.
She was able to get home insurance for the first year she lived there, but the insurer refused to renew the following year and she has been unable to get insurance since. “I called many insurers and none of them would touch me,” she said.
Severe weather warnings have been issued in the UK this week, with some areas expected to get a month’s rainfall in just a few hours. Experts say that more and more people are struggling to insure their homes against flooding.
“Insurers’ appetite is just contracting all the time,” said Liz Mitchell from the specialist broker Flood Assist. “We’re not able to broker insurance for properties we used to be able to help, because firms are just withdrawing left, right and centre.”
The reason for this, Mitchell said, was climate change, which is bringing wetter winters and more severe, frequent and less predictable flooding — and this is starting to hit insurers in the pocket. Firms paid out £117 million for flood claims affecting homes in 2023, according to the Association for British Insurers (ABI), an industry body, up from £62 million in 2018.
Damage from flooding is usually covered by a standard home insurance policy — you will normally need both building and contents cover for your home and possessions to be protected. The average cost of insuring a home that has flooded before was £451 in January, according to the consumer site Compare the Market, up 28 per cent from £352 the year before. That compares with an average cost of £247 for insuring a house that has never flooded.
“Home insurance premiums have gone up for a variety of reasons, including the rise in weather-related claims and the increasing cost of rebuilding homes,” said Louise Clark from the ABI. “More needs to be done to support communities to be resilient to storms and flooding. We need the government to further invest in flood defence and maintenance.”
But, as Bennett found out, some insurers are reluctant to make any offer at all to the riskiest properties. In January Storm Henk caused about £2,500-worth of damage to her home. The Thames burst its banks at Chertsey and swept into her garden, flooding her shed and the decking around her home. She said: “I can’t describe the shock I was in. The water was coming through and we started pumping it into the car park, but it was soon obvious that there was absolutely no point. It was awful.”
• How to limit the cost of storm and flood damage
Since 2016 insurers have been able to access a scheme called Flood Re, set up by the government and the insurance industry to make sure that households at risk from flooding can get affordable home insurance. Insurers collectively pay Flood Re a levy of £135 million a year to run a re-insurance scheme which pays out when customers’ homes flood. Firms pay Flood Re an additional fee for each home insurance policy they want to re-insure against flooding. This fee is based on the council tax band of the property, rather than its flood risk, which helps to keep costs down.
“I would advise you to shop around. There is no reason for insurers to worry about the cost of insuring a flood-prone home if they can insure the flood element with us,” said Andy Bord, the chief executive of Flood Re.
Flood Re said it insured 265,000 policies last year, up from 127,326 in 2017. It said 32 per cent of the 7,500 claims it has received since 2016 were made in the last year. However, the scheme only covers homes built before 2009, to discourage the building of properties on floodplains. This means an insurer would not be able to use Flood Re if they agreed to offer home insurance to Bennett, whose home was built in March 2009 — three months too late to qualify.
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This could be a problem for people living in the 110,000 homes that have been built in areas of high flood risk in the past decade, according to the insurer Aviva. The Environment Agency estimates that the number of properties on floodplains could almost double in the next 50 years.
Between 2009 and 2020, about 20,000 homes were built in flood-prone areas without flood defences, according to the environmental think tank Bright Blue.
Some companies are reluctant to insure homes that are not covered by Flood Re. The insurer Ageas UK said it did not offer insurance to any properties in flood-prone areas built in 2009 or later. Firms including Axa, Admiral and Aviva said they would decide whether to insure homes on a case-by-case basis. “When we started brokering four or five years ago we were able to do a lot more for post-2008 homes than we can now,” Mitchell said.
• A flood could nearly double the cost of your home insurance
Even people living in older homes are finding it difficult to get affordable insurance in flood-prone areas. In January Bryony Sadler’s insurance renewal with Bradford and Bingley went from £800 to £3,500 a year — up 338 per cent. Sadler’s house was built in 1892, which means it should be eligible for the Flood Re scheme.
“They completely stuffed us. We have been loyal customers for ten years. We have only made one claim in 2014 because of flooding, and it’s not like I left a tap on and it was my fault,” Sadler, 49, said.
She lives with her husband, Gavin, 45, and their children Toby, 16 and Elsa, 13, and her mum, Julie, who is 80. Their home was flooded ten years ago after heavy rainfall and the family had to move out for nine months. The tens of thousands of pounds of damage was covered by her insurer.
Markerstudy, the parent company for Bradford and Bingley home insurance, said: “Mrs Sadler has been a valued customer and we appreciate her disappointment with the renewal price. Costs are increasing because insurers are seeing a lot more claims due to an increase in the frequency and severity of weather events.”
LV, which underwrites Sadler’s policy and so sets the price, said: “Having reviewed the property’s flood risk, we have had to increase the premium. Flood Re only protects the flood risk of the policy and not other perils, such as subsidence.”
Flood Assist helped Sadler to find a cheaper home insurance policy but she is still paying £1,200 a year.
The Climate Change Committee estimates that by the 2050s, even if serious efforts are made to reduce carbon emissions, 2.6 million people in the UK could be at significant risk of flooding, up from 1.8 million today. If carbon emissions are not drastically reduced, it would be 3.3 million.
When you buy a property you should check at gov.uk whether it is vulnerable to flooding and how you can reduce the risks. Any previous flooding should be included on a TA6 form, which sellers have to fill in.
If you are buying a new build, you can look up its planning application through the Planning Portal and read its flood risk assessment. You could also pay a specialist to do a flood risk survey, which typically costs a few hundred pounds.
• Compare home insurance providers• How to make a claim for storm and flood damage
The flood protection campaigner Mary Long-Dhonau recommends getting a flood door, which will block water; airbricks that shut when water is rising, and flood-resistant plaster for the walls. She said a non-return valve could stop water coming up through toilets and drains.
“The very fact that you can show that you are aware of the risk and have taken all these measures will help you get insurance,” she said.
If you are struggling to find an insurer, check the British Insurance Brokers’ Association’s flood insurance directory of specialist firms.
“The very fact that you can show that you are aware of the risk and have taken all these measures will help you get insurance,” she said.
If you are struggling to find a willing insurer, you can also check the British Insurance Brokers’ Association’s flood insurance directory, which lists the firms that specialise in flooding.