Insurance: Flood Control
(asked on 21st February 2022) - View Source
Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:
To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment has he made of the potential merits of requiring insurers to request individual property information where a property's flood risk is mitigated by resilience measures.
Answered by
Rebecca Pow
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs)
In July 2021, Government committed to make changes to the Flood Re scheme, that provides affordable insurance to households at high risk of flooding. These will improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the scheme and increase the uptake of property flood resilience measures helping communities across the UK to become more resilient to the changing climate. Government laid draft regulations in Parliament on 27 January implementing these changes including allowing insurers to help flooded households to build back better, up to a value of £10,000 above the cost of like-for-like reinstatement. This will make their homes more resilient to future flooding using products such as air brick covers, flood doors and water-resistant kitchens and plasterboard. Government expects the regulations to come into force on 1 April, subject to the will of Parliament.
The Government also announced it will publish a roadmap at the end of 2022 that will identify the actions required across industry and Government to successfully grow and underpin the nascent PFR market.
The Government is also committed to allow Flood Re, the scheme administrator, to offer discounted premiums for households that have PFR installed and recognises the role it can play in driving behaviour change in the insurance market.
The Government plans to give Flood Re the powers to provide discounted premiums when the Government has published the PFR roadmap, and a mechanism is in place to determine eligibility effectively. The Government remains fully committed to implementing this change. We will work closely with Flood Re, the PFR roundtable and the insurance industry as part of the development of the roadmap to determine how best to achieve this.