With the UK weather throwing wet winters and summers at property owners, you may be worried that you need specialist flood insurance to protect your property. Jason McLean from The Property Insurer offers some tips to help you decide.

Finding out if you need flood insurance is as easy as 1-2-3

Regardless of how difficult it is to forecast the weather, it is a lot easier to forecast whether you need specialist flood insurance.No flood insurance is probably required if you can answer NO to these three questions:

1: Has your property ever flooded?  If you have flooded in the past then you will need specialist flood insurance cover in the future. It doesn’t matter what flood defences are in place, you have claims history for flooding and will need to declare it to get insurance.

2: Have properties near you flooded? Generally if properties within a mile or so of your location have suffered flooding then you will most likely be tarred with the same brush and seen as a high-risk property. In this case you may well be determined a flood risk property even without suffering any flooding. It is made a little more precise in question 3.

3: Do you feature in the Environment Agency’s flood risk map? The Agency has determined what it believes are the most at risk areas in the UK – these postcodes are used as a guide by insurers to determine flooding risk. If you are in an at risk post code, then you will need flood insurance, it’s as simple as that, irrespective of whether you or any properties nearby have flooded.

So if you have answered no to the above three questions, it is most likely you do not need specialist flood insurance. If you have answered yes to any or all of them then you will need specialist flood insurance.

If you need flood insurance

The best thing you can do is speak to the specialist brokers. Make sure you have all information possible about prior claims, flood defences, rebuild values and anything else relevant. Don’t be shy about telling them if you haven’t actually flooded before, the more information you give them the better.

You should compare flood insurance just like any other insurance product. It’s not so easy with only a small number of specialist providers that are difficult to track down but if you click on FLOOD INSURANCE then one short form that takes two minutes to fill in will have three of the best UK specialists competing to give you the best policy at the best price.

If you don’t need flood insurance

Then go to any of the big name home insurance providers and get your insurance that way. Price comparison is widely accepted as the best route and you can get UK based specialist providers quoted for you.

Apply common sense

The final thing you should do is apply common sense to your situation. If you have answered no to all three questions and live at the top of a steep hill with no rivers within 10 miles, then your chances of flooding are slim indeed. On the other hand if you have answered no to all three questions but the river at the bottom of the garden laps at your back door every winter, then you may want to make sure you have flood insurance in place just in case.

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