More than half a million homes in England could be ineligible for home insurance unless action is taken to protect them against flooding, the insurance industry warned today. The Association of British Insurers (ABI) warned that its members could stop offering flood protection as standard on all home insurance policies, in a report published a year after thousands of homes in Hull were hit by flooding.
The report stated insurers could not commit to covering all the homes identified by the Environment Agency as being at significant risk of flooding, over 517,000 of them, unless the government announced plans for them to be adequately defended.
The ABI added that without government action and stricter enforcement of planning controls to prevent new homes being built on flood plains, some properties could become "uninsurable, unsaleable and uninhabitable". It was also stated that last year's floods in Hull and Gloucester led to 180,000 claims for flood-damaged homes, businesses and vehicles, and that its members had dealt with four years' worth of claims in two months.
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