The UK’s Climate Change Committee convened a citizens’ panel this year.
One question: should households facing less climate risk help pay for those facing more. The focus was on adaptation.
The panel didn’t resolve it. Nobody has.
That’s not a gap in the process. It’s the actual shape of the problem.
Published this month in Flood Industry Magazine.
The 2039 deadline on Flood Re
Flood Re, the scheme that has kept flood insurance affordable for the UK’s highest-risk homes, ends in 2039. It was built as a bridge, on the assumption that adaptation would cut risk fast enough to make it redundant.
That assumption hasn’t held.
The CCC’s May 2026 assessment puts numbers on what’s coming instead: 92% of homes at risk of overheating by 2050, peak river flows up to 45% higher, £11 billion a year needed for adaptation against £60 to £260 billion a year in damage without it.
The instinct from here is to hand the insurance question to government, or to insurers, or to a model. Set a formula, find the optimal split, move on.
What happens after Flood Re?
That instinct is the problem.
This is not a technical question with a right answer. It’s a political one, about how a society shares the cost of a risk it didn’t create equally and won’t experience equally. Government can design a scheme. Insurers can price it. Neither has the standing to decide, on behalf of the households who’ll carry the cost, what’s fair.
The CCC’s panel is the closest thing to a legitimate approach we’ve seen so far. Its members mostly agreed some shared costs across adaptation made sense, but only within limits, and only with full transparency on where the money goes. That’s not indecision. That’s the public doing the work no model can do: weighing fairness against affordability, in public, with the people who’ll live with the outcome.
Do we leave it to the market? Australian households in high-risk areas now face premiums that can hit £16,000 a year, with 1 in 7 already in affordability stress.
Do we regulate insurance pricing? California suppressed insurance pricing until insurers left the state outright.
How do we plan for the uninsurable? New Zealand estimates 10,000 coastal properties could become uninsurable by 2050, with no political mechanism yet for deciding who bears that.
In every case, the cost question got answered anyway. Just not by policy. By market withdrawal, after the fact, with the least protected households left holding the loss.
The UK still has time to choose the deliberate version.
Worth sitting with for anyone in insurance underwriting, real asset investment, or public policy who’s assumed this gets settled by modelling rather than by a decision the public has to be party to.
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