Lower Marsham · part 7 of 7
How to Help Without Lying
Lower Marsham, an epilogue. On the scheme Britain could have built, and could still
Having spent six essays on the wreckage, the reader deserves a proposal, and a critic who withholds one past this point is merely decorating his objections. So let it be said first, without irony and at full volume: the problem Flood Re answered was real. Before 2016, households faced quotes near £4,400 or no quotes at all; a home that cannot be insured cannot be mortgaged, sold, or left, and the researchers who warned of “extensive social blight” were not exaggerating. There is even a respectable welfare model, incorporating the moral hazard and the fiscal spillovers, finding that a substantial flood-insurance subsidy, in the region of 46 per cent, clears an honest cost-benefit test. Nothing in this series has argued against help. The whole of it has argued against one method of helping, which is to deliver the help by falsifying a price and letting the falsehood loose in the housing market to compound.
The menu of honest options open to a government are short, which is a mercy, because it means the honest scheme can be described on a single page.
First, let the premium tell the truth. Risk-reflective pricing is not the punishment in this design; it is the information system, the salesman for flood doors that Episode Five watched the current scheme shoot. Every distortion catalogued in this series, from the Hendersons’ £4,083 to Mr Bryce’s ground-floor sockets, traces back to the decision to hide the number rather than address it.
Second, help people with money they can see. If the household on the Staithe cannot afford the true price, subsidise the household, visibly: a means-tested discount applied at the point of sale, itemised on the schedule, funded on a budget line that the Treasury must defend at each spending review. The arithmetic can be identical to today’s; the levy could even survive as the funding instrument. What changes is that the assistance becomes a transfer, that Parliament must look at annually, rather than a false price that nobody has to look at ever. A transfer can be aimed. Today’s version cannot, which is how 12 per cent of the pool came to be Band H, and why the nurse in Halifax underwrites the parquet at the Hall. Under an itemised discount, the Hall applies for its subsidy like everyone else, and the means test does the rest of the essay’s work for it.
Third, make resilience worth money. The Flood Performance Certificate arrives in pilot form this year; give it teeth. Let a fitted flood door and resited wiring move the premium, the mortgage rate, and the certificate handed to the next buyer, so the door pays a dividend in three currencies at once. Convert Build Back Better from an offer into a default: resilient reinstatement as the standard settlement, oak-effect nostalgia available on request as the opt-out. The Germans price property-level protection as a matter of course, and their insurers manage to do it without a reinsurance pool consulting the tax valuations of 1991.
Fourth, close the front door. Commence Schedule 3 of the 2010 Act, sixteen years dormant, so drainage stops being a promise. Put the sequential test into statute rather than guidance, so that failing it is a refusal and not a talking point in the planning balance. Give the Environment Agency’s objection real weight; a body that is right about water should not be overrulable three hundred times a year by bodies that are right about housing targets. None of this costs the exchequer anything worth naming. It costs planning inspectors a discretion they have demonstrably misused.
Fifth, replace the cliff with a glidepath, published now. The terror of 2039 is its shape, one season in which true prices arrive all at once, and cliffs of that shape are precisely what legislatures cannot walk off; the American Congress proved it twice. So publish the taper today: the subsidy declining on a fixed schedule, year by known year, capitalising into house prices gradually while the discount regime catches the households who genuinely cannot pay. A glidepath announced in 2026 gives every buyer, lender, and surveyor thirteen years of honest expectations. It also, not incidentally, removes the fudge from the menu, because a fudge requires a cliff to be rescuing people from.
Assemble the five and notice what they amount to. The same money, roughly. The same protected households, more accurately targeted. The same industrial machinery of levies and pools, if wanted. The single difference is that every number in the system would mean what it says: the premium would describe the water, the discount would describe the need, the certificate would describe the door, and the deadline would describe itself. It is the cheapest reform in this series’ territory, because its raw material is arithmetic already being done and merely not being shown.
Events, being expected, have already arrived to mark the homework. On the scheme’s tenth anniversary this July, Flood Re and Defra announced a reform package, and it can be scored against the page above with unusual precision. Item three has been conceded in principle: premium discounts for certificated resilience, and Build Back Better enforced through a lower claims cap on insurers who withhold it. That is this essay’s direction of travel, adopted, and it is acknowledged here without reservation beyond the pilot-shaped gap between an announcement and a renewal schedule. Item two has been conceded in caricature: the Bands A and B contents tariff halved from April 2027, the wider structure to be “rebalanced” toward poorer households from 2028 — targeting, at last, but targeting by the 1991 proxy, delivered inside the price, itemised on no budget line, with the pass-through to customers resting on the load-bearing word “expected.” The transfer has been aimed better. It has not been made visible, and visibility was the point. Items one, four and five received nothing: the premium still may not tell the truth; the front door stands open, the package’s own co-signatory being the department that cannot close it; and of a glidepath there is no word, the year 2039 appearing nowhere in the announcement at all. Call it two and a half concessions out of five, every one of them worked in the old material. The reformers have repainted the rooms this series toured. The house is the same house, and the reader knows by now what the house is standing in.
Will the rest of it happen? The 2028 implementation round — when the claims cap and the revised premium structure are to be settled with the industry — is the natural occasion, and the reader of Episode Six already knows the odds I have registered. Honest schemes have a constituency of everyone and a lobby of no one, which in the political marketplace prices them somewhere below the fudge. But the case had to be put on the record, if only so that nobody in 2039 can claim the alternative was never described. It was described here, in a village that does not exist, beside a river that does.
She has been the silent... no, strike that; she has been the unconsulted partner in every proposal this series has examined, and she is unconsulted in this one too, which is fitting, because this is the first design that requires nothing of her. Honest prices ask the river no favours. They only repeat what she has said. The river has not read this essay either. For once, she would have found nothing in it to correct.
Principal sources: Solomon (2024) on optimal flood insurance subsidy; O’Neill and O’Neill for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation; Flood Re Transition Plan (2023) and FPC pilot; Flood Re/Defra reform announcement (1 July 2026); Surminski and Thieken (2017); Flood and Water Management Act 2010, Schedule 3; TCPA proposals on the sequential test. This concludes the Lower Marsham series, pending events, which are expected.