Flood Re has marked its tenth anniversary with a package of reforms that will affect how flood insurance is priced for years to come — including a new certificate for flood resilience, modelled on the Energy Performance Certificate. Here's what's actually changing, and what it means if your home has flooded before.
Published July 2026 · A RISE update · 6–8 minute read
On 1 July 2026, Flood Re — the government-backed reinsurance scheme that underpins affordable flood insurance for at-risk homes in the UK — marked ten years since its launch with the biggest set of reforms to the scheme since it began. Working alongside the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), Flood Re announced changes that touch nearly every part of how flood insurance is priced, subsidised and earned.
If you own a home that has flooded, or that sits in an area at risk of flooding, this is worth understanding properly. Some of it is good news. Some of it signals a shift in how insurers will expect you to prove your home is resilient — not just tell them it is.
The centrepiece of the announcement is the Flood Performance Certificate, or FPC. Flood Re describes it as a trusted, standardised assessment of how resilient a specific property is to flooding — and draws an explicit comparison to the Energy Performance Certificate, the A-to-G rating that has been a legal requirement for selling or letting a home in England since 2007.
This isn't a brand-new idea dropped on the market overnight. Flood Re published its original FPC Roadmap back in June 2024, and has spent the two years since working with insurers, lenders and engineering consultants on how to actually build it: what data points to measure, how to verify that resilience work has genuinely been carried out, and how to make the resulting certificate meaningful to an insurer pricing a policy. What was announced on 1 July is the next stage of that existing plan, not the start of a new one.
The practical effect, once it rolls out, is that a homeowner who has invested in flood resilience measures — flood doors, non-return valves on drains, raised electrics, resistant flooring, and similar — will be able to get that investment formally assessed and recorded. Flood Re has confirmed that premium discounts will be available to households that obtain a full FPC, or complete a simpler self-assessment version of the same thing.
Flood Re's own reporting makes clear why this reform was necessary, not just desirable. In three of the last four years, the scheme has spent more money repairing homes in Council Tax Bands G and H — the most expensive properties, fewer than 4% of UK homes — than it has spent repairing homes in Bands A and B, which make up around 45% of the housing stock. Flood Re's chief executive has been candid that the scheme is increasingly subsidising higher-value properties, and that the cost of claims from those homes has risen faster than the scheme can sustainably absorb under its current rules.
At the same time, the number of households relying on the scheme keeps growing. Policies ceded to Flood Re rose 20% in a single year, to over 346,000 in 2024/25, and more than 742,000 households have benefited from the scheme since it launched. The Environment Agency's most recent national assessment puts around 4.6 million properties in England at some risk of surface water flooding, with roughly 1.1 million of those at high risk. 2026 itself began wetter than average, with Cornwall recording its wettest January on record.
Flood Re is not an open-ended scheme. It has a planned wind-down date of 2039, thirteen years from now, at which point flood insurance is meant to have transitioned to a fully risk-reflective private market. Every reform announced this month is being framed against that deadline — as a way of keeping the scheme financially sound for the households that still need it most, for as long as it continues to exist.
The most immediate, concrete change is a straightforward one. From April 2027, Flood Re will more than halve the premium it charges insurers for contents-only policies on homes in Council Tax Bands A and B — cutting it from £52 to £25. The intention is to help lower-income households and renters directly, with insurers expected to pass the saving on rather than absorb it. For context on how lopsided the current system has become: premiums for Band H properties ceded to the scheme have risen from £1,200 at launch in 2016 to £1,613 from April 2026, while Band G premiums alone have risen by roughly 45% in just over a year.
The other significant change is an expansion of Flood Re's existing Build Back Better initiative, which allows insurers to fund up to £10,000 of resilience improvements as part of repairing a home after a flood — rather than simply reinstating it exactly as it was, ready to flood again in the same way next time. More than 70% of the residential insurance market now offers this as standard, and Flood Re's stated aim is to push that further, in part by allowing insurers who don't offer it to face a lower cap on the claims they can pay out.
This is a genuinely useful scheme, and one that far too few homeowners know to ask about at the point of claim. If your policy includes Build Back Better and you don't raise it directly with your insurer or loss adjuster during the repair process, there is a real risk your home simply gets reinstated as it was — not as it should be.
None of this is live yet in a way that changes your premium tomorrow. The FPC is still in pilot and development; the premium cut for Bands A and B doesn't take effect until April 2027. But the direction of travel is clear, and it rewards exactly the kind of preparation that is easy to neglect in the aftermath of a flood, when the priority is simply getting your home dry and liveable again.
Three practical points worth acting on now, while this is still developing:
Report your flood formally, not just to your insurer. A Section 19 investigation, where your Lead Local Flood Authority has a duty to formally investigate and record a significant flood, creates an official record that exists independently of your insurance claim. If Flood Performance Certificates eventually draw on any official flood history data, an undocumented flood is a flood that, on paper, never happened.
Ask about Build Back Better before repairs begin, not after. If your policy is with an insurer who offers it, raise it explicitly and get it in writing. Don't assume your loss adjuster will bring it up unprompted.
Keep a record of any resilience measures you install. Receipts, product certifications, installer details, dates. If an FPC assessment becomes something you can obtain in the next few years, you will want the evidence trail ready rather than trying to reconstruct it after the fact.
The reforms Flood Re has announced are, on balance, a sensible response to a scheme under real financial pressure. But like most reforms that reward documented behaviour, they will help the homeowners who already have the paperwork — and do nothing for the ones who don't.
Sources and further reading: Flood Re, tenth-anniversary reform announcement and Flood Performance Certificate Roadmap (July 2026, originally published June 2024); Flood Re Limited, Annual Report and Accounts 2024-25 (HC 1019); Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, joint statement on Flood Re reforms (July 2026); Environment Agency, National Assessment of Flood and Coastal Erosion Risk in England 2024 (NaFRA2, published January 2025).
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