Found out my house is high flood risk

Oomz

I'm looking for some help and advice, apologies for the lengthy post.

I was minding my own business one day when i accidentally discovered you can check an areas long term risk of flooding by putting in your postcode and door number.

To my surprise, my house which i purchased 3.5 years ago is high risk for surface water flooding on the front driveway, medium for the neighbouring drives and low/verylow everywhere else.

I had no idea about this during the house purchase as the solicitors did not mention any flood risks. I got back in touch with the solicitors who said they did not do an environmental search and the mortgage lender did not need one. The solicitor then offered one for free which shows what i already know

I have never seen a hint of flooding anywhere, nor have the neighbours who are all retired and lived in the culdesac for 25+ years. The pensioner i bought the house from lived there for 38 years and said there has never been flooding on the solicitors form. There has been no historical flood alerts or flood history in the area. My home insurance premiums have always been around £200 for buildings. There has been a flood alleviation scheme done in the nearby park 2 years ago where a flood basin was created, this is where the surface water runs to. We had Storm Babet flood our city centre in 2023 and there was not a hint in my area.

Despite not seeing anything related to a flood, this has left me very stressed and anxious with regards to the future of the property and its ability to sell. This was planned to be a forever home as it ticks every box and has really good space to extend upstairs and downstairs. I've loved every moment of living here until finding out this information.

Should my solicitors have done an environmental search, were they negligent?

Will i have trouble selling my home in the future? Should i expect to lower the price due to this risk?

Keep_pedalling

The house we moved out of was also in that category for surface water and we were there for 37 years without incident and it did not impact us selling.

Our garden used to get pretty soggy in very wet weather but that was as far as it went. 

Albermarle

You say it is a forever home, but you are worried about what will happen when you sell it?

It would be a massive overreaction to move out of a home you love, due to seeing this surface water warning, which may be just plain wrong or misleading. Plus your experience so far and the previous owners would indicate the threat is not very high, so seems like little to worry about. Probably much more likely you will fall down the stairs, or fall off a ladder, or get hit by the proverbial bus.

user1977

No, no, no and no, respectively.

The search you're looking at is a very rough, thumbnail prediction based on respective heights of land, watercourses etc. Nobody has come out and surveyed your garden, your street's drainage etc in any detail. If nobody local thinks it's ever flooded, what are you worried about? In fact, if all it shows is that your driveway might flood once in a blue moon, and not your house, so what?

RAS

Look at your drive, preferably when it's raining. 

Is there a point were rain water flows over the junction with the road onto your drive?

Is there a low point where rainwater collects on the drive?

Does either of these allow water to threaten your house?

Can you do anything within the curtilage to redirect the water away from house.

More likely, you need to keep an eye on the road gutters and rainwater gullies up and down hill of your house and hassle the Council if any are really  blocked. It may however be as simple as raking out the crisp packet and leaves covering a grate a few door up to massively reduce the water running past your drive.
 
And make sure the gullies taking rain water from your own house are working properly.

If you want a little more understanding, look at the Calder Valley Flood Groups. Although all of them cover areas where there have been multiple instances of severe flooding, mainly from the river but also surface water, so much more problematic than yours. They've now got a handle on the surface water issues and completed flood schemes.

Bookworm105

if this is intended to be a forever home then your situation is down to what sort of gambler are you?
will you happily wager expecting to win on long odds or expecting that on average you will lose?

I have a house on the  high risk surface flood map  The only reason it is on the map is because of an incident in 1967 when a local stream overflowed its bank and the water ran down the road.
Does anyone in the street care? No, the banks were reinforced and a repeat of those circumstances is impossible. 
Has it impacted insurance? Yes 
Will climate change impact the future? Probably. possibly, no chance .

Will future buyers be scared off, none have in the last 50+ years 

Bottom line is, floods when they happen are expensive, but that is what insurance is for.  After all the flood maps are "predictions" of the 1 in 100 , 1in 50 etc so we back to betting on the outcome of the 3:30 race at Wincanton, a few will correctly predict it, the majority won't.

BonaDea

It's probably because you and/or your neighbours have paved over the front garden to create a hard driveway, so rain can no longer soak into the ground, thus creating a risk of surface flooding.  I have to say I have always thought this a very anti-social thing to do (as well as ugly) but appreciate that opinions differ.  Whatever you think of the practice, it will become more controversial as the consequences of climate change begin to bite.  Here's an early sign:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jul/17/londoners-should-be-charged-for-paving-gardens-says-climate-resilience-report

silvercar

Same here. Curiously, we are the high point on the road, yet we are high risk of surface flooding and others are medium or low. Our back garden slopes downwards towards a culvert at the bottom of the garden that has only ever become a quarter full at most.

BarelySentientAI

Oomz said:

To my surprise, my house which i purchased 3.5 years ago is high risk for surface water flooding on the front driveway, medium for the neighbouring drives and low/verylow everywhere else.

I've loved every moment of living here until finding out this information.

You love every moment of living in your "forever home", but now you have found out that someone's map shows that the driveway might flood (but nobody can ever remember that actually happening in real life) and this has caused such a problem that you're panicking about its sale price?  A huge over reaction.

If it hasn't flooded, doesn't look like flooding, and nobody can remember it looking like flooding, then don't worry about it flooding because a random map on the internet says otherwise.

GDB2222

Are there steps up to the front door, so the house would stay dry even if the drive floods? 

Oomz

Thank you all for the replies.

I don't plan on moving suddenly because of this but the longer term plan was to do a side and back extension to make it my forever home, it's now got me thinking about whether I would really want to do that...I guess time will tell.

The driveway is half gravel and half block paving (there when I bought it), if I were to have the driveway re-done it would be SuDS compliant.

My house is at the end of the culdesac, there are 2 drains (one infront of my drive and another about 5 metres away), all the water runs into these drains. All driveways including mine have a gradual slope up to the house and thus water runs down the drives to the drains.

I guess I am having an over reaction but I am quite risk averse and i do suffer from GAD. The discovery did come as a shock because I was not aware of this at the time of buying the house.

Is there anything I can do regarding the solicitors? Can I put in a complaint to the Ombudsman for negligence? Is it negligence?

Being risk averse I might not have bought the house knowing this information.