The Council’s submission said analysis of the National Flood Information Database found 229,445 properties - or about 1.5 per cent of all properties in the country - faced a one-in-20 year flood risk. More than half of these properties are in NSW and most of the rest are in Victoria and Queensland.
When considering rarer floods,the Council said there were 674,160 properties across the country – or 4.4 per cent of the total – that faced a one-in-20,one-in-50 or one-in-100 year flood risk.
The submission said that even though a minority of houses faced this level of flood risk,flooding had accounted for more than 54 per cent of the industry’s losses in the past five years,and it repeated the industry’s call for more emphasis on disaster mitigation.
The data was contained in a submission to a House of Representatives committee inquiry into insurers’ responses to last year’s east-coast flooding disaster,which was the most expensive insurance event in the nation’s history,leading to $7.4 billion in claims.
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ICA chief executive Andrew Hall said the risks to homes from floods were more predictable than the risks from storms or other disasters,and advances in data meant insurance premiums increasingly reflected the risks facing an individual property,rather than a postcode. Insurers have already lifted premiums for at-risk homes sharply,and Hall highlighted the prospect of more people under-insuring in the future.
“So we do face a growing risk of a gap for those homes that are in unsafe locations being hit with the highest premiums,and therefore either under-insuring or not insuring at all,” Hall said.