With the wind whipping off the Humber estuary, Martin Lennon, Director of Policy and Government Affairs at Flood Re, and I look up at the Hull Tidal Barrier that looms above us. The 30 metre-high, 200 tonne structure is both the maritime gateway to the city, and its protector. As a flood barrier, it’s second only to London’s Thames Barrier in size. But it’s more active than its southern cousin. Whereas the Thames Barrier is sometimes only put to use a couple of times a year, the Hull Tidal Barrier is closed about 12 times a year. A report published by the Environment Agency in 2010 said that without the barrier, “a high surge tide would result in damages to Hull in excess of £230M with the flooding of 17,000 homes.”
Where better, then, to talk about flood risk?
Flood Re began ten years ago (2016) as a joint initiative between the Government and insurers. It aims to make the flood cover part of household insurance policies more affordable. Flood Re is technically a ‘reinsurer’. You may have heard talk of climate change making properties increasingly uninsurable? Well, this is where Flood Re comes in. They step in to help cover the flood risk part of a policy.
“We have about 6 to 8 million homes at risk of flooding in the UK”, explains Martin, over the noise of the bracing Humber wind. “And, if we look over 30 years, flooding generally causes about £600 million worth of damage to homes in the UK. That is a very insurable problem. However, some of that risk is concentrated in properties that are very elevated flood risk, where you get high levels of repeat flooding… this creates a problem where some homes are then facing very expensive insurance. Flood Re exists for those small, relatively small number of homes, about 350,000 at the moment, that we provide reinsurance for.”
The clever bit is that Flood Re doesn’t fill the gaps with taxpayers’ money. Instead, every insurer that offers home insurance in the UK must pay into the Flood Re scheme. This raises £160m every year, which is used to cover the flood risks within home insurance policies.
Flood Re works with insurers behind the scenes. When you buy home insurance cover, your insurer can choose to pass the flood risk element to Flood Re. Most likely, you wouldn’t even know unless you’re an avid reader of small print. If you make a valid claim for flooding, the insurer will pay the claim; Flood Re simply reimburse them. Additional funding of up to £10,000 through a Flood Re initiative called Build Back Better allows homeowners on an eligible policy the ability to install property flood resilience measures as part of flood repairs to improve the resilience of their home.
The scheme has helped more than 742,000 households access flood insurance since its launch in 2016. Martin gestures to the Hull Tidal Barrier again. “I was living and working in Hull before the creation of Flood Re, and there were large areas of Hull which were really struggling to get insurance, particularly at an affordable price.” Now that is no longer the case. But with climate change, risks are increasing. “We see, particularly in the central projections, an increase in surface water risk from climate change and an increase in the number of homes that are likely to be at risk.”
This, he suggests, makes prevention an even greater focus in the years to come. “We are seeing a lot of investment in flood defences, a lot of public investment from the Environment Agency, local authorities… and with water companies. And that will be concentrated at the repeat flood, high-risk properties. If we can reduce that number, we should be able to get to a situation where Flood Re is no longer needed”. That is a time-bound goal rather than an aspiration. Flood Re, at least in its current guise, only runs until 2039. So, we’ve got 14 years to bring down flooding to a manageable, insurable problem in the UK.
Flood Re’s flood-resilient garden at the 2024 RHS Chelsea Flower Show demonstrates how thoughtful planting, permeable surfaces and water-storage features can help a garden capture and manage heavy rainfall, reducing the amount of water reaching the home.
Martin believes we’re on track. In the ten years since Flood Re began, England has seen £10 billion investment in flood defences. We’re already seeing this pay off, he says. “Last winter [2025/26] is a really good example of that. The Environment Agency shows we had a very, very wet winter, about 160% of expected rainfall. Yet we had a very small amount of flooding, about 500 homes flooded in England last winter. The EA figures show about 200,000 homes have flooded over 30 years, so we’d expect 8000 in an average year – 500 is really very low for a very high level of rainfall.” He says this not to be complacent; rather, to prove that the strategy is working. For every pound spent on flood defences – be they physical barriers or nature-based solutions – we get seven pounds back in benefits and avoided costs, he says. Rather than sit back and admire a job well done, in fact, we need to push ahead and ensure the whole of the country is flood resilient before Flood Re closes its reinsurance fund in 2039.
One aspect of this is to zoom in on the household level. Currently, one requirement of a house sale in England and Wales is an Energy Performance Certificate, or EPC, that rates a property's energy efficiency from A (most efficient) to G (least efficient). Flood Re have announced plans for a Flood Performance Certificate (FPC) to become a similar requirement, rating how well a home keeps floodwater out and how quickly it recovers when water gets in. Work has started on a pilot scheme, continuing through 2027, with FPCs aiming to reach the market by 2028.
Of the 6.3 million properties in England believed to be at risk of flooding, the majority of them, 4.6 million, are at risk from surface water flooding, not from rivers or seawater. This, as extreme rainfall events increase with climate change, can come from storms alone. Figures from the Association of British Insurers show that weather-related insurance claims for homes and possessions hit £585 million in 2024, more than triple the total in 2022, driven largely by an increase in flooding and other climate-related events.
“Whether or not a home floods is often the result of many factors”, explains Martin. “It's particularly true when we talk about surface water flooding. Lots of flooding in the UK is less than 10 centimetres. That can be the difference between a puddle in your garden or a flood that keeps you out of your home for 12 months. And the differences will actually be very much about how your house is built.”
Just as Energy Performance Certificates help you make your home more energy efficient, so Flood Performance Certificates “help people understand how their home is vulnerable to flooding and what they could do about it.” Installing simple flood prevention measures will help protect houses against flooding, but the aspiration is that in the future, they will also lower their insurance premiums. It will also offer households a simple checklist of measures, rather than what can often be guesswork today. Flood Re is working in partnership with The University of Hull’s Property-level Flood Resilience Lab to provide the evidence base for what exactly those measures should be (I will write more about the Lab and its findings in an upcoming blog).
Flood Re: Contain the Rain Garden, a Gold Medal Winner at Chelsea 2026
2026 has also seen Flood Re stepping out from behind the scenes with a number of public-facing events, including an educational roadshow across UK towns and cities, and even a garden at the Chelsea Flower Show. The public engagement has been really rewarding, says Martin. “Generally, people are quite surprised to discover the steps they can take; it's quite empowering for people.” Such as how “your garden can protect your house”. Flood Re’s display garden at Chelsea in 2024 focused on localised flooding, and showed how even a small garden “can absorb loads and loads of water. That garden could hold around 110 bathtubs of water. Again, when we've got issues like really heavy rainfall, gardens that can absorb that water can really be the difference between someone having their home flooded or it just being a puddle in the garden… having permeable surfaces with proper soakaways around the outside, is really important.”
To check if you’re in a flood risk area, check out the government postcode tool: https://check-long-term-flood-risk.service.gov.uk/postcode. And view a surface water map to see where any floodwater might spread to. “Prevention”, says Martin, “is always better than cure”. I’m sure the mighty Hull Tidal Barrier behind us would agree.
