Flood Performance Certificates: What Flood Re's Reform Package Means

On 1 July 2026, marking ten years since Flood Re was established, Emma Hardy MP, Minister for Water and Flooding at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, announced a significant package of reforms to Flood Re. Among them was the formal commitment to develop and pilot Flood Performance Certificates, or FPCs.

As Emma Hardy put it: “Last week, I announced reforms to Flood Re (affordable insurance for flood risk properties), which halve premiums for those in lower income households as well as provide incentives for those who add flood resilience measures to their properties.”

At FPS Environmental, we welcome this. Our flood risk consultants took part in the engagement and feedback process that helped shape the development of FPCs, alongside Flood Re, RAB Consultants, Sedgwick and other stakeholders across the property flood resilience sector. It is a subject close to our work, so it is worth setting out what has actually been announced, what an FPC is, and what it means in practice.

What Is a Flood Performance Certificate?

An FPC is best understood as the flood equivalent of an Energy Performance Certificate. Where an EPC tells you how energy efficient a home is, an FPC will tell you how resilient a property is to flooding, what could happen if a flood occurs, and what level of floodwater would cause what level of damage.

The certificate combines a property’s flood hazard (the risk it faces from rivers, the sea, surface water, groundwater, sewers or reservoirs), its physical characteristics (age, construction, floor area and the lowest point at which water could get in), and any existing property flood resilience measures already installed. Put together, this gives homeowners, buyers, insurers and lenders a clear, consistent picture of a home’s flood performance, and what could be done to improve it.

This matters because, at present, property flood resilience is assessed on an ad hoc basis. Two households might spend the same amount protecting their homes and end up with very different results, with no consistent way to compare or communicate that protection. An FPC framework is designed to fix that.

How the Assessment Works

Flood Re‘s roadmap, and the subsequent standardisation work carried out by RAB Consultants and Sedgwick, set out a tiered, risk based assessment framework with three levels.

A Standard assessment applies to every residential property and uses data that is readily available, such as flood mapping, property age and type, and homeowner self declaration. If a property is found to be vulnerable to flooding, meaning water could realistically reach its lowest point of entry, and has no verified resilience measures in place, it escalates to a Standard+ assessment. This involves a trained assessor reviewing more detailed information remotely, such as sewer flood risk, basements, listed status and recent alterations. Where significant uncertainty remains, the property escalates again to an Enhanced assessment, involving an on site survey by a registered PFR professional.

This proportionate approach means the level of scrutiny matches the level of risk. A property with no identifiable flood hazard needs no further assessment. A property with a genuine flood risk and untested protection measures gets the scrutiny it needs.

You can download the full Flood Re and RAB Consultants report here: Standard PFR Data for Flood Performance Certificates

Why This Matters to Us

This is exactly the kind of forensic approach we have always pushed for. Time and again, we see resilience measures installed without proper investigation of the problem first, non return valves fitted in the wrong place, flood doors specified without checking the actual route of water ingress, or barriers installed that do not address the real mechanism of flooding. An FPC framework, properly implemented, should reduce that. It requires evidence of a post installation flood risk report, in line with the CIRIA C790 Code of Practice, before any resilience measure can be verified and credited within the certificate.

Timeline and the Wider Reform Package

The FPC framework is expected to be piloted by the end of 2026, with a view to integrating it with discounted insurance pricing structures by 2028, and wider deployment in the years that follow.

The wider reform package announced alongside FPCs includes a significant reduction in the premium Flood Re charges insurers for lower value, contents only policies, more than halving it from £52 to £25 from April 2027. This is intended to reduce costs for lower income households and renters, with insurers expected to pass the saving on. Flood Re has also indicated it will work with insurers to better balance premiums between wealthier and less well off households, and to cap the value of claims that can be passed through the scheme.

Flood Re’s Transition Plan

Flood Performance Certificates sit within Flood Re’s wider transition plan, which tracks a series of indicators as the scheme moves toward its planned exit from the market in 2039. Two of those indicators are directly relevant to the work we do every day.

Indicator two, development with flood risk in mind, looks at how much new housing is being built in areas of flood risk. The latest statistics show that in England 7% of new residential addresses were in Flood Zone 3, described as the Environment Agency’s best estimate of land at risk of flooding when defences are ignored, covering land with a 1 in 100 or greater annual chance of flooding from rivers, or a 1 in 200 or greater chance from the sea. The National Infrastructure Commission has recommended that planning guidance require all new development from 2026 to be resilient to flooding from rivers with an annual likelihood of 0.5%, without increasing risk elsewhere.

Indicator three, adapting to climate change, tracks how well the UK is preparing for a changing climate. In 2023, world temperatures were, across the year, 1.5°C higher than pre industrial times for the first time. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations reached a new peak that year and have continued to rise. The third National Adaptation Programme, published in July 2023, is the Government’s overarching adaptation strategy, updated every five years. The Office for Environmental Protection’s 2024 annual progress report rated overall progress in this area as Limited, noting that many actions were carried over from previous strategies with very little new funding attached.

Our Flood Risk Assessments and Surface Water Drainage Strategies directly support both of these indicators. They are how flood risk gets properly considered at the point a site is planned and designed, rather than retrofitted once a property is already at risk.

Where FPS Environmental Fits In

FPS Environmental Ltd are a leading team of engineers and consultants, able to advise across flooding and the broader engineering and environmental areas that sit around it.

If you have found this page because you are thinking about Flood Performance Certificates, there is a good chance you are actually thinking about a Flood Survey, the practical starting point for understanding your own property’s flood performance. For commercial premises or more complex sites, such as blocks of flats or larger developments, our Flood Investigation and Management Strategy service provides the kind of forensic investigation an FPC framework is designed to require, working out why a site floods before recommending how to fix it.

And for developers and planners working through indicators two and three of Flood Re’s transition plan, our Flood Risk Assessment and Surface Water Drainage Strategy services are there to help get flood risk right from the start.