So Now The Sensible Have To Subsided The Fool That Built His House On The Flood Plane

[youngmafbog]

1/2 % on insurance for all so some can enjoy the idyllic riverside setting.

Got a house near a river Gideon?

[Gromit]

£180million has to be raised from you and me every year. Our home insurance is overcharged, and the overpayment used to fund an insurance scheme for people with a riverside dwelling.

Those dwellers will get the peace of mind of being able to buy expensive insurance on their homes.

But the main beneficaries are the insurance companies themselves who will get the £180million of our money, not the riverside dwellers.

It has all the hallmarks of a scam.

[VHG]

Surely it is "floodplain" not "flood plane"

[Gromit]

VHG

Thank you for your contribution, it was most unhelpful.

[EDDIE51]

Why? For the same reason that careful law abiding motorists who have never had an accident have to subsidise the insurance of careless drivers who have had a string of accidents. It all adds to the overall risk.

[Gromit]

Eddie,
But if you live on the top of a hill, you do not want to be paying insurance for flooding. Unlike roads were the risk to everyone is equal, the majority of us are at no risk of flooding.
Young people pay more for car insurance because they are a bigger risk, not everybody else paying more to keep the young scally's insurance down.

[Baldric]

Whose house has subsided on what flood plain?

[mikey4444]

I'm not very happy to have to pay more for my insurance but accept that its going to happen.

I am much more concerned at the local Councils that allowed houses to be built on the flood plain in the first place.

[Ellipsis]

> So Now The Sensible Have To Subsided The Fool That Built His House On The Flood Plane

No. People's houses that aren't on flood plains are flooding because somebody has built on a flood plain somewhere else.

[mikey4444]

Ellipsis....to be honest, its not just flood plains that were effected this last winter. Enormous amounts of rain, almost continual for weeks on end, caused rivers to flood and effect lots of people that were not on a flood plain.

[Gromit]

Mikey,

The levy will pay for peoples' insurance where the house is at high risk of flooding. Those who have claimed before recently and seen their premiums rocket, or uninsurable. Houses that have flooded because of a heavy downpour in a once in a lifetime event, will not benefit from this scheme.

[mikey4444]

Gromit....it would have been difficult to produce retrospective legislation.

[Gromit]

Not retrospective, but any future heavy rain event will not be covered.

Hebden Bridge in Lancashire is 150 metres above sea level, but flooded this winter.

http://i.huffpost.com/gen/3822990/images/o-HEBDEN-BRIDGE-facebook.jpg

It was a once in a lifetime event and it would be unreasonable for insurance companies to deny flood insurance to anyone living there. They will not benefit from this levy.
It is for people whose houses are constantly being flooded who find themselves uninsurable. This bung to the insurers is in exchange to insuring high risk properties.

[EDDIE51]

Gromit you and I DO pay extra insurance for young tearaways, careless drivers and those who drive with no insurance at all.( there is a levy on all motor insurance policies to fund 'uninsured claims')
The risk is spread out over all policies, if there was not a greater % claims from the high risk groups all policies would be cheaper. Low risk drivers pay less but not a little as they would pay if there were no 'high risk' drivers.
Same with house / flood insurance.

[Ellipsis]

> Ellipsis....to be honest, its not just flood plains that were effected this last winter.

That's what I said. :)

[Old_Geezer]

Surely premiums at set proportional to the risk ? Those who bought on the flood plain get asked for premiums they can't afford and so sue the idiots who made building there possible/legal each year: whilst those who had the sense to buy a home outside of any flood plain gets asked for a small premium as they aren't going to make so many claims. And then the government tries to dissuade folk from having insurance at all by taxing it; but that's all they know how to do.

[Hypognosis]

The Somerset levels are a special case whereby, as in Holland, water was pumped out of swampland for decades and the soil shrank, leaving useable farmland but at a cost of it being a few metres below sea level.

I'm sure we have the engineering know-how to build houses on stilts or on bouyant foundation platforms but anything which eats into a developer's profit margins just isn't going to be built. Carpets, furnishing, kitchens and home entertainment installations are deemed to be replaceable, so insurance customers must bear this burden, instead of them.

Housing development is only a big thing because interest rates are artificially being held low and other growth opportunities are either too weak, too abroad, or higher risk, so I also blame the BofE for shaping our economy in such a way as to make the flood plains into a cashcow.

[EDDIE51]

It is possible to get insurance cover that does not include 'flood damage' but of course that means no cover for pipe bursts or water main damage as well as 'natural floods'.

[Hypognosis]

@EDDIE51

Now that is just mean-spirited. Domestic pipe bursts are a risk every householder faces, so that should still be a shared risk, on everyone's premium.

Water mains are outside householders' ability to control. Maybe not all of us are within range to be at risk from a burst but it has to be a sizeable percentage of us.

I like the way that individualised risks can lower *my* premium but I still say the whole idea of insurance is to *spread* the risks. Same ethos as the NHS: everybody pays in the same (percentage, in NHS' case) but not everybody gets to see a "payout". In fact having your health is the "win", just as not having to ever claim on house insurance is the win.