Enhancing the Flood Re journey on Coverall

Head of Broker Development at Prestige Underwriting, Tim Baxter shares his thoughts with youTalk-insurance on the need for flood protection cover, and how, as a business, Prestige Underwriting has evolved its non-standard home insurance product to offer more protection to customers.

The Prestige Underwriting commitment….

Including Flood Re functionality within our proposition to market was a commitment that we made some time ago. 

Our aim remains firmly to support the distribution of and broker access to Flood Re while at the same time coupling this to our established non-standard Home facility providing an all-encompassing solution for unique Household risks. 

Enhancing accessibility to Flood Re for our brokers and their customers, is an area of huge importance for our business as well as the wider market as we have seen with other initiatives such as the BIBA Flood Re directory and the ‘Build back Better’ scheme receiving significant focus at the moment.

Flood Challenge….

What must it be like to go bed when it is raining and be fearful that by the morning, your home will be ankle deep in water?  

That is the reality for so many people. Flood is a real and present risk. In 2020, the Environment Agency declared 1 in 6 homes in the UK is at risk of flooding. That’s about 5.3m homes. The precarious position these families find themselves in has multi layered causes, some of which are unpredictable but others are as a result of social and economic policy decisions.

Weather is unpredictable and the changes in the climate has increased the propensity of flooding but it is stakeholder decisions that have compounded the situation. The perilous living of these families has been exacerbated by policy choices – poor river and water meadow management and poor planning strategies allowing over development and building on flood plains.

It is not unreasonable to expect that as the risk of flooding increases, the efforts to mitigate the impact would step up. The reverse has happened and the Environment Agency expenditure has decreased substantially. According to a letter from Emma Howard Boyd, chair of the Environment Agency, “since 2010, funding for the EA’s work has been cut from £120m to £43m.”   

Collectively, there needs to be better solution and a solution that changes faster than the weather changes.

Any turbulence caused by climate change produces a complex and rapidly changing environment and there is a clear need for effective adaption.

Defences and future protection….

There will always be more that can be done to improve flood defences and reduce exposure to flooding for homeowners, as we have discussed above, however we have been very excited to see the development of behind Flood Re ‘Build Back Better’ which has been designed to reduce the cost and impact of future floods by including property resilience measures as part of flood repairs.  As a business we are actively evolving our product to account for the Build Back Better offering and look forward to bringing this further evolved proposition to our customers in coming months.

Distribution and customer accessibility….

Our ambition is to offer all qualifying customers, who find themselves in a higher risk Flood area and in need of cover for slightly more unique property and individual circumstances, the opportunity to quote on our Flood Re enabled product through their preferred trading channel.  We already offer our Flood solution to brokers via our Portal and also through software house utilising EDI and real time environment pricing.  We have also recently launched an aggregator focussed Flood Re solution in partnership with a key broker that now offers Flood Re to customers who prefer to source cover through a comparison site.  We are thrilled to provide a non-standard Flood Re enabled solution to the mass market and continue our investment in the evolution of our Flood insurance initiative.

About Tim Baxter, Head of Broker Development

Head of Broker Development, Tim leads the Prestige Underwriting team dedicated to engaging and managing relationships with the GB broker network and exploring new opportunities throughout the market.  With Prestige Underwriting since 2014, Tim has worked within the industry for more than 22 years across a variety of claims, underwriting and business development roles.