Insurer's chief warns England is building homes that may become uninsurable

The chief executive of one of Britain's largest insurers has warned that thousands of homes now under construction could become impossible to insure as flooding risk climbs. Amanda Blanc, who leads Aviva, said the danger is no longer a distant prospect, pointing to current building patterns as the cause. "Homes are being built today that could become uninsurable in the future," she told the BBC's Big Boss Interview podcast, adding that the likelihood of flooding is "absolutely increasing."

Her central claim rests on a projection that is difficult to square with planning decisions now being made. On current trends, around 115,000 new homes will be erected inside designated flood zones over the next ten years. For Blanc, that figure is not a statistic to be noted and shelved but a sign that policy has lost touch with geography. She said it did not make sense to her, and that planners should stop to consider where those properties are going up at all.

Crucially, Blanc argued, this is not an insoluble problem. The locations most exposed to flooding are already mapped and widely understood, she said, so the information needed to make better decisions exists. Her point was less that England is being caught out by an unforeseeable trend, and more that risk is being accepted knowingly at the point where homes are approved, designed and begun.

Official estimates underline the scale of the exposure. According to the Environment Agency, about 6.3 million homes and businesses in England are already at risk of flooding. That figure spans the whole stock of property, not just recent construction, and it is the part of the problem most individual households cannot influence or escape.

New building is where the concern is sharper, and Aviva's own data points in the same direction as its chief executive's warnings. The insurer's research found that one in nine homes completed between 2022 and 2024 sits at medium to high risk of flooding. Extending the time horizon sharpens the picture further: nearly a third of the homes built in 2024 are expected to face some level of flood risk by 2050, while one in seven are projected to be at medium to high risk as extreme weather becomes more frequent and more severe.

The backdrop to those projections is a measurable change in the climate baseline rather than a series of isolated events. Earlier this year, the Met Office estimated that with current levels of global warming, record-breaking wet winters of the kind the UK experienced in 2023-24 have shifted from something that happened roughly once in 80 years to something that could recur about once in 20 years. Flood risk is therefore being priced into an environment that is becoming less forgiving over the lifetime of a mortgage, not merely a single bad season.

Understanding what "uninsurable" means matters for homeowners, developers and lenders. Insurers assess risk by property, location and construction standards, and a growing cluster of homes in areas with a worsening flood record eventually crosses the point where the risk stops being commercially acceptable to cover. At that stage properties can still be bought and sold, but mainstream cover becomes unavailable or prohibitively expensive, and the buyer inherits the problem without a remedy. Some households turn to specialist or mutual providers; others find the cost of protection simply out of reach. Flooding images from Loughborough, where homes were hit in January last year, offer a reminder of the physical reality behind the insurance argument.

Blanc said the conversation needs to extend beyond homes that sit directly inside a flood zone, because construction on the edges of those zones requires a different approach too. She noted that a great deal can be done to a property to make it either more or less vulnerable to flood — through design, materials, drainage and siting decisions taken at the drawing-board stage. On that reading, the trajectory of future insurability is being determined now, in planning committees and on building sites, rather than in insurance offices later.

The BBC has approached the government for comment. The timing is not incidental: Blanc used the interview to urge ministers to avoid what she called policy "kite flying" ahead of Chancellor John Healey's first Budget, scheduled for 28 October. She appeared to be warning that announcing measures which are then abandoned or reshuffled has consequences — not least for consumer confidence and for households making long-term financial decisions.

That concern is grounded in her experience as the head of a major UK private pension provider. Speculation over recent Budgets about potential changes to pensions drove withdrawals to around 30 times the normal rate over the past year, Blanc said. She stressed that customers may come to regret the decision, since a tax-free lump sum, once taken, cannot be put back. Her message was not that policy should be frozen, but that changes should be thought through very carefully before they are trailed, tested or announced.

Only a handful of announcements have been made so far, including a scheme designed to help first-time buyers get on the property ladder and a commitment from Healey to deliver a "new age of industrialisation" for the UK. Both touch on the same fault line Blanc raised: increasing housing supply in places that are already vulnerable, and doing so without clarity about the long-term rules.

On investment, Blanc said Aviva is "ready with capital" to put into UK infrastructure. The group already invests more than £100bn in the UK, of which around £35bn goes into infrastructure, spanning hospitals, schools and windfarms. She said the returns are attractive for pension holders and scheme members, while conceding that more detail is needed before the ambition becomes concrete projects.

Finally, she weighed in on the debate over the pension triple lock, which raises the state pension by the highest of average wage growth, inflation or 2.5%. Declining to say what should happen to it, Blanc noted the trade-off: lower increases to the state pension would have to be offset by higher private provision. Taken together, the themes of her interview — flood risk, pension certainty and infrastructure spending — point to a business leader pressing for a more coherent long-term framework before households are asked to make bigger, harder financial commitments.