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Home insurance Catch-22 for everyone living near floodplain

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Homeowners who live in or near a floodplain are distracted by a Catch-22 situation on the subject of getting insurance, according to a Which?report released today.

Before an insurance provider agrees in order to safeguard home, it should take the dog owner to disclose, to the best of their knowledge, when they live in a flood risk area. When they disclose info on flooding, the insurer may well not offer cover. However if the owner doesn’t offer information, any claim they cook on their own insurance could be dismissed, said the consumer body.

To beat this risk, says Which?, it’s wise to approach only insurers that look at home’s specific risk rather then basing quotes on the area. It saw that different insurers’ method of assessing flood risk varied wildly. Some use sophisticated techniques to analyse potential flood risk as well as others rely on more general postcode data.

Of the 50 insurance providers Which? tested, Aviva and Stroud & Swindon offered one of the most comprehensive solutions on the market today. They’ll use the newest mapping systems that look at the proximity of waterways as well as other relevant terrain features, and mix information together with the Environment Agency (EA) flood map and flood defence data to pinpoint someone property’s flood risk.

Other insurers, including Northern Rock (http://www.northernrock.co.uk/) and LV, asserted that their flood risk assessment was developed at postcode level, almost about claims historical background and the EA map, a strategy the Which? report termed “basic”.

Malcolm Tarling of your Association of British Insurers (ABI) asserted most households made it possible to find some volume of flood cover from their insurance firm and that insurers were increasingly using modern-day data to assess flood risk.

“We come with an industry wide statement of principles in place as a result insurers continue to provide cover to existing policyholders who’ve been flooded before where that flood risk has been managed,” he said. “However, that will inevitably go to a premium designed to reflect possibility or will occasionally call for a significantly increased excess on the policy.”

The excess is a area of the claim which must first get paid through the policyholder. In the example of homeowners who may have previously been flooded, insurers sometimes impose excesses higher than

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