You might be looking to buy specialist home flood insurance because your existing insurer has become reluctant to continue to provide cover, has removed the element of flood protection from your home insurance policy, or has substantially increased the cost of the premiums / policy excess for continued cover.
The reasons for your current insurer doing this is because of the apparent vulnerability of your home to flooding or a recent claim for flood damage that you may have made.
Assessing the risks
Before you buy flood insurance, therefore, there are a number of steps you might take to assess the risk of your home flooding:
- first, you might research the history of past events that involved some form of flooding – by asking previous owners and checking local press reports, for example;
- for a current assessment of the homes vulnerability, you might check the Environment Agency’s flood risk service – which identifies one of four levels of risk (high, medium, low and very low) according to your property’s postcode; or
- the Association of British Insurers (ABI) suggests that you may wish to commission a formal property-level flood risk survey – which is a professional investigation, carried out by an engineer or chartered surveyor, using an industry-standard formula for reporting flood risks.
Whatever method you use for assessing the risk of flooding to the property you own – your home or a holiday home, for instance – it is important that the findings are reported accurately and honestly to your insurer. If you fail to disclose something you have discovered – or might reasonably have been expected to know – the insurer is entitled to reject any flood damage claim you subsequently make.
Your decision to buy
The cost of flood insurance in a high risk area might be discouraging. After several successive winters when storms led to significant flooding, the consequential flooding and the equally inevitable tide of insurance claims, insurers generally have been under pressure to increase their funds for settling claims by increasing the prices of premiums.
In recognition of the difficulties this has caused many home owners in high risk areas, the government and the insurance industry generally devised a re-insurance scheme called Flood Re.
Participating insurers may then have the financial backing and certainty provided by a re-insurance scheme such as this – and, therefore, have the freedom and incentive to lower the cost of flood insurance accordingly.
UKinsuranceNET’s role
Our role here at UKinsuranceNET in securing you lower flood insurance premiums is to match your own, individual needs and circumstances to those insurers working under the protective umbrella of Flood Re.
Although Flood Re may be providing the reassurance of a safety net to your flood insurance company, your dealings are entirely with the latter, your insurer, without your need to have any direct contact with Flood Re itself.
On your behalf, we have already identified those insurers taking part in the Flood Re scheme, so the only action on your part is to consider the competitively priced and hand-picked flood insurance quote we send you – and make your online application in the easiest and most straight forward way.
