Lower Marsham · part 5 of 7
The Door Nobody Fits
Lower Marsham, Episode Five. On Mr Bryce, the third skip, and the salesman the scheme shot
Mr Bryce’s cottage on the Staithe has flooded three times since 2016, and it has been restored three times, and the three restorations were identical. Same skirting, same oak-effect floor, same sockets thirty centimetres off the same screed. Opening the door to the loss adjuster for the third time, the routine has lost its novelty; the adjuster knows where Mr Bryce keeps the stopcock and Mr Bryce knows the adjuster takes two sugars. The third claim, like the second, ran to the national average for these events, which sits between £60,000 and £90,000 and is not declining. One claim in eight paid by Flood Re is for a property, like this one, making a return visit.
Here is the question this episode turns on. Why, after the first £70,000, did nobody move the sockets up the wall?
Not because the technology is exotic. A flood door, non-return valves on the drains, a waterproof membrane behind resited plaster, sockets at waist height: the package is well understood, costs a few thousand pounds, and converts a £70,000 claim with nine months in a caravan into a wet weekend with a mop. Not because Mr Bryce is a fool; he is a retired quantity surveyor and can price a mop against a caravan without assistance. He never fitted the door for the same reason you have never fitted one, which is that nothing in his financial universe has ever asked him to.
What a premium used to be for
An honestly priced insurance premium is a salesman for prevention, the only one the trade has ever produced that works. When the price of cover reflects the risk, every flood door pays a dividend, visible on next year’s schedule; the German market runs on this principle, and in Germany 86 per cent of building insurers actively account for property-level protection when pricing a policy. The premium walks up the path once a year and makes the case for the door.
Flood Re shot the salesman. Under the scheme, Mr Bryce’s tariff is fixed by his council tax band; it was the same before his first flood as after his third, and it would remain the same if he clad the cottage in bathroom tile and hinged the furniture to the ceiling. The signal that pays for doors has been disconnected at the wall. Survey evidence from the UK market shows what grows in the absence: more than 75 per cent of British insurers do not treat flood warnings as an effective risk-reduction measure worth recognising, and around 40 per cent see no value in internal flood-proofing improvements at all. Why would they? The risk is ceded at a flat tariff to a pool that does not ask either.
The scheme’s designers were not blind to this, and their remedy exists, and its performance is the second exhibit. Build Back Better allows an insurer to add up to £10,000 to a flood claim for resilience measures, so that the third restoration need not duplicate the first two. Uptake among households offered it runs at about one in three. Two flooded families out of every three, offered ten thousand pounds of free prevention at the exact moment prevention has never been more vivid, decline it and reinstate the oak-effect floor at sock height. The leaflet, that promises the £10,000 in bold on its cover, goes home in the loss adjuster’s folder. Some of this is trauma, and some is the tyranny of “getting back to normal,” but a good part is the plain economics the scheme itself has installed: resilience buys Mr Bryce nothing on his premium, nothing on his tariff, and until recently nothing on his sale price, since Episode One established what the market now pays for flood history, which is nothing.
The pattern repeats at national scale with an almost pedagogical tidiness. Schedule 3 of the Flood and Water Management Act 2010, which would make sustainable drainage mandatory in new development, has sat uncommenced for sixteen years, a law passed but never switched on. Average claim costs are not falling. The properties at risk were recounted in 2024 at 6.3 million, one English home in five, with 8 million projected by mid-century. A country facing that curve has two levers, defence and adaptation, and it has wired its main financial instrument to pull against the second one. Flood Re does not merely fail to fund the doors. It pays, on a recurring schedule and at rising cost, for their absence, and it will pay for Mr Bryce’s fourth restoration on the same terms as his first.
There is one genuine light on this horizon, and since this essay was first drafted somebody has switched it on, at least at the mains. The Flood Performance Certificate — an EPC for water, making a property’s resilience measurable and portable — pilots from late 2026; and the reform package announced on the scheme’s tenth anniversary this July commits to premium discounts for households that obtain one, or complete an equivalent self-assessment. Read that plainly, because it is the first sentence of its kind in a decade: a flood door is to move a number on a schedule. The salesman has been offered his job back. He should examine the contract before signing. The discount is to be set against a tariff that remains risk-blind by band, and a percentage off a price that never asked about the water is a curious sort of dividend, though a real one; the certificate exists so far as a pilot, the discount as a commitment, and the distance between commitments and renewal schedules is where this series has spent five episodes. Build Back Better, meanwhile, is to be “strengthened by incentivising insurers”: those who decline to offer it will face a lower cap on the claims they may pass to the pool, which is at least the right species of lever, aimed for once at the party who actually reads the small print. The £10,000 itself is unchanged, as is the one-in-three uptake it must work upon. Judgment reserved, then — but reserved in a friendlier tone than this episode has taken toward anything else, because the scheme has now conceded, on the record, the argument of this essay: that resilience must be worth money. A confession of that size deserves banking, even while the cash is still in the post.
The river passed Mr Bryce’s threshold three times and found the same room waiting each time, which she registered, in her way, as hospitality. She does not begrudge him the oak-effect floor; she has no opinion on flooring, or on anything. The river has not read the Build Back Better leaflet. She has, however, audited its uptake personally, and she will be round again to check the sockets.
Principal sources: Flood Re Annual Report 2025/26 and Transition Plan indicators; Surminski and Thieken (2017) on UK and German insurer practice; Environment Agency NaFRA2 (2024); Flood and Water Management Act 2010, Schedule 3; Flood Re/Defra reform announcement (1 July 2026). Next in the series: The Deadline That Hinges, on 2039, with a prediction the author intends to be held to.