The information provided in this article is is of a general nature and should not be considered as specific advice for individual situations. A lot of it is common sense but we have used our years of experience to help you find authoritative information from Government websites.
Flooding and home insurance
It has become increasingly difficult for home owners to find affordable home insurance including flood cover if their home has already flooded or is in an area at risk of flooding. In fact many found it difficult to find any insurer prepared to cover them at any price. In order to overcome this the Government pushed UK major insurers and the ABI (Association of British Insurers) to form an organisation called FloodRe.
“Flood Re is a re-insurance Scheme that makes flood cover more widely available and affordable as part of your home insurance. Flood Re helps households at the highest risk of flooding. We also provide information about taking action to reduce flood risk. Flood Re will run for 25 years, at which point insurers should be offering policies based on actual risk to property.”
Flooding and Static Caravan Insurance
FloodRe does not apply to caravan insurance though so what can you do?
First of all the best thing to do is to establish what the flood risk of your caravan site is. Each country in the UK has its own organisation responsible for flood information and control. In England it is the Environment Agency. Links to this and similar organisations in the other home nations is provided below. The most useful tool that they offer is a flood map which allows you to establish if your caravan park, or part of the park that your caravan is sited on floods. You need to make sure all of the layers are turned on. For example make sure you include surface water and flooding from rivers and the sea. You can also set up flood alerts which could be useful if you have a touring caravan on a seasonal pitch that you could move if you are worried about flooding.
England – Environment Agency
Flood Map England
Scotland – SEPA
Flood Map Scotland
Wales – Natural Resources Wales
Flood Map Wales
Northern Ireland
Flood Map Northern Ireland
You can help us to improve our assessment of flood risk in your area
The Caravanwise static caravan insurance policy includes flood damage unless it is not available on your site, because the underwriter has though the risk of flooding on some parts of the park are just too high, and in this case there will be an endorsement on your schedule of insurance which removes the flooding section from cover. We have assessed many static caravan sites in all four nations and, if you know your site postcode you can enter it here to see if we are able to provide full flooding cover.
If you think we have got it wrong or think that the part of your site on which your caravan is sited is well above the flood risk line we need to hear from you. We are very happy to reassess any site and would like to be more sophisticated in flood assessment by identifying where individual caravans are sited.
Caravanwise has been arranging insurance for caravans on static caravan parks in the UK for nearly 25 years. Established June 1998.