House Insurance, Floods and Huge Secret Pipes Underground

When we moved to our humble little house, OK it is not that small once you get in it, in fact it is about two and a half times bigger that it appears on the outside but this is all a distraction from the point of this post. You see when we moved here about four years ago our old house insurance company said . . . . OOOOO that post code is a low risk flood area so we cant INSURE your house, but here is the name of one that will . . . . Well it was a bit of a worry, but the new company insured it OK at almost the same price provided we had a £7000 flood excess. Well I looked and scratched my head trying to work out how the house could flood which seemed rather unlikely, but we got insurance cover and all has been well until the start of this month when the insurance company wrote to us and said. . . . OOOOOOOO look we need to increase your premium a bit because you are now in a high risk flood area . . . . . What I thought . . . .  how did that happen.

Well they wanted to increase the premium by more that twice, which to my mind was madness. I mean I have never worked out exactly how a house where all the fields to one side of it are between 10 and 50 feet lower and head gently downhill for several miles and there is no high ground above us, is actually going to flood.

So I thought OK I will research this and checked the Governments Environmental Agency website flood maps and had a good chat with all the old locals, who remember the old days of biblical flooding and plagues of frogs and the like. And when I did this I discovered that rather that being a low risk flood area we are in fact a no risk flood area.  So I have been complaining to the insurance company about it a bit , but a man said . . . Oooo but the thing is your house sits on the ground and so water might seep into it from below, or there might be a huge water pipe below it that no one knows about. . . .  NO I am not joking he said that.

In fact it appears that insurance companies now fear flooding a great deal, probably due to some of the big floods that have happened in recent years in areas where there is a flood risk. Not in a small village on a hill where there is no flood risk unless most of Britain has vanished under water. So I have removed the flood insurance from our house, because it CAN NOT flood and have saved over £600 by doing it. OK if the washing machine decides to go . . . OOOOO I don’t feel well . . . BLAAaaaaiiiirrr and is sick all over the utility room it appears I am still covered. But I am not covered if the secret huge water pipe hidden under the village that no one knows about decided to burst and all the water seeps up though the floor.   Had my house not been attached to the ground then everything would have been fine. . . . I think not, I like my house attached to the ground to me that seems safer.

One small but very ironic point is the main office of the insurance company according to the Environmental Agency is in one of the highest risk areas in Britain for flooding, next to the River Thames. Although I am told they are not worried about it as they have a huge secret pipe leading the water away, where it will be dumped in a small unsuspecting village in the middle of nowhere.

I also went to IKEA today but that is another story.

Link to Environmental Agency Flood Map