Insurance chief warns England is building homes that could become uninsurable as flood risk climbs

Amanda Blanc, the boss of insurance giant Aviva, has warned that homes being constructed today could become impossible to insure in future because of rising flood risk, and accused planners of failing to face up to where new housing is going up. "That doesn't seem to me to make sense. We need to think about where those homes are being built," she told the BBC.

Speaking in the BBC's Big Boss Interview, Blanc said England was "for sure" building properties that might one day be uninsurable. Her warning is backed by Aviva's own analysis, which projects that, on current building patterns, about 115,000 new homes will be raised in flood zones over the next decade. She said the locations of flood-prone areas are already well mapped, and suggested decisions about new developments should begin with that knowledge rather than after it.

The scale of exposure is significant. According to the Environment Agency, roughly 6.3 million homes and businesses in England are already at risk of flooding — a figure that makes the question of where future development goes far more than a local planning dispute. Aviva's research adds a second, more uncomfortable data point: one in nine homes completed between 2022 and 2024 sits at medium to high risk of flooding.

Longer-term projections are starker still. Aviva estimates that nearly a third of new homes built in 2024 will face some level of flood risk by 2050, while one in seven will be in the medium-to-high risk category, as extreme weather becomes more acute. The underlying driver, Blanc said, is straightforward: the risk of flooding is "absolutely increasing."

Climate scientists have been edging towards similar conclusions. Earlier this year, the Met Office estimated that at current levels of global warming, record-breaking wet winters of the kind the UK experienced in 2023-2024 have shifted from once-in-80-year events to once-in-20-year events. That reordering of the odds has obvious consequences for anyone trying to price risk decades into the future — and for householders who may discover, only when they try to sell or remortgage, that cover is no longer available on the same terms.

The flooding of homes in Loughborough in January last year offered a recent illustration of how quickly such risk can materialise on a street. For insurers, exposure of this kind is a two-sided problem. Premiums rise for everyone, including those on well-designed, well-sited property, and the temptation to withdraw cover from the most exposed postcodes grows, leaving owners without a route to market. That is the dynamic behind Blanc's forecast about uninsurability: a market retreating from risk rather than a single bad season.

Blanc also stressed that new build is not the only variable. Construction on the edges of flood zones, she argued, needs a different approach altogether. "You can do all sorts of different things to your property to make it more or less vulnerable to flood," she said — pointing to the idea that resilience measures built in at the design stage are far cheaper than retrofitting homes after they flood, and far cheaper than repairing the damage.

The warnings land at a politically sensitive moment. The BBC has approached the government for comment, and the timing is no accident: Chancellor John Healey is due to deliver his first Budget on 28 October. Blanc urged ministers to avoid policy "kite flying" before then, a complaint that echoes unease in the private pension industry about the same issue.

Aviva is a major UK private pension provider, and Blanche — sorry, Blanc said speculation over the last couple of Budgets about pension changes drove a dramatic jump in withdrawals. "Effectively we saw in the last year 30 times the normal withdrawal from pensions that we would normally see, which is clearly something which customers may regret afterwards because once you take your tax-free lump sum out, you can't put it back in," she said. Her message to policymakers: be "very, very thoughtful" about the changes they test.

So far, announcements ahead of the Budget have been limited. They include a scheme to help first-time buyers get on the property ladder — directly relevant to a debate about building more homes — and a commitment from Healey to deliver a "new age of industrialisation" for the UK. Housing supply and risk management, on Blanc's account, cannot be treated as separate agendas.

On investment, Blanc said Aviva is "ready with capital". The company already invests more than £100bn in the UK, of which £35bn goes into infrastructure, ranging from hospitals and schools to windfarms. "We've got that capital. We want to invest, we're a big UK employer," she said, adding that UK infrastructure offers good returns for pension holders and scheme members — while cautioning that detail is needed to turn that intent into reality.

Finally, Blanc weighed in on the debate over the pension triple lock, the rule under which the state pension rises by the highest of average wage growth, inflation or 2.5%. She declined to say what should happen to it, noting it is not for her to dictate. But she did flag the knock-on effect of any reduction: "If you've got a lower state pension then you need a higher private pension, don't you? So you need to think about that balance."

Taken together, the interview presents a single argument from an insurer with exposure on both sides of the market. Aviva holds property risk through home cover and holds the pensions that will have to absorb longer-term costs, and its chief executive's message is that England is treating flood risk as a future problem when it is already a present-tense one — and that the coming Budget is a moment to settle that question rather than keep it in the air.