UK flood resilience plans fall as insurance losses climb

Previsico’s second annual State of Flood Resilience Report landed on June 25 with a blunt message for UK insurers and commercial property owners: flood awareness is rising, but preparedness is sliding backward. Based on input from more than 70 organisational leaders, the report found that fewer than 1 in 10 organisations now have a flood action plan in place across all locations, even as weather losses keep climbing.

The clearest warning sign is the collapse in planning. Just 8% of respondents said they or all of their clients had flood action plans, down from 30% in 2025. At the same time, 72% said they believe they will personally be affected by flooding in the future, while 56% sometimes feel overwhelmed by the challenge and 25% feel overwhelmed frequently. Cost and budget were the main barriers, followed by uncertainty about future flood risk. That is the resilience-action gap insurers keep running into at renewal and in loss prevention: people know the risk is real, but they still are not building systems and workflows around it.

The claims backdrop is getting harsher. Previsico said weather-related insurance claims reached £1.2 billion in 2025, up 14% from the year before. The Association of British Insurers put total property claims for the year at £6.1 billion, the highest annual total on record, with £1.2 billion of that tied to weather-related property claims. Previsico also warned that annual flood losses could rise five-fold by 2050 if current patterns continue, a projection that gives underwriting teams little room to treat flood as a one-off catastrophe peril.

The exposure map is widening too. The Environment Agency said 6.3 million properties in England are already in areas at risk of flooding from rivers, the sea or surface water, and that number could rise to around 8 million, or about one in four properties, by the middle of the century. The agency said the new assessment reflects improved modelling, new data and changing climate projections, and noted that the last full NaFRA update was in 2018. For carriers, brokers and property managers, that pushes flood intelligence closer to the center of underwriting, renewal and claims triage. Event monitoring, property-level risk scoring and policyholder engagement tools are moving from nice-to-have dashboards to operational inputs that decide who gets warned, who gets reviewed and who gets help before the water arrives.