Flood Risk Indicator

The Flood Risk Indicator is a textual result indicating flood risk to registered land.

The Flood Risk Indicator combines Environment Agency flood data with Land Registry property data to provide customers with a high level indication of whether a piece of land is at risk of flooding.

The result is provided on a title-by-title basis for registered properties within England and Wales.

It is available via Land Registry's Find a property Service, providing customers with an instant online indicator of flood risk for the land they are interested in.

Please see: Flood Risk Indicator example

The Flood Risk Indicator result is designed to increase awareness of the likelihood of flooding for any registered piece of land in England and Wales to encourage people living and working in areas prone to flooding to find out more and take appropriate action.

The Flood Risk Indicator can also be used by those people who wish to apply for planning permission to see whether the site they plan to develop is in a flood risk area. It will appeal to those involved in buying and selling houses, property owners and developers.

For further information see Environment Agency website

Flood Risk Indicator combines Land Registry address data with Environment Agency flood data to identify flood risk for a registered piece of land within England and Wales.

The flood information from the Environment Agency combines detailed local data from modelling and mapping studies with information from a national model of England and Wales.

For rivers, detailed survey data information about the topography or ground surface is combined with information on flows.

For coastal areas, Environment Agency takes detailed survey data and combines it with analysed sea level and wave data. This allows it to work out the water level at the coast and how the water could flood inland.

Where detailed mapping is unavailable, the Environment Agency have supplemented its data with national generalised modelling, which gives a consistent picture of flood risk for all rivers with a catchment size greater than 3 km² and the sea.

Flood Risk Indicator is a textual result indicating whether the registered land you are interested in is:

• wholly outside of a floodplain and therefore also indicates how close the land is to the nearest floodplain
• wholly within a floodplain and therefore also indicates the likelihood of that land being affected by flooding
• partially affected by a floodplain and therefore also indicates the likelihood of flooding for the part of the land affected by the floodplain (unfortunately we are unable to indicate which specific part of land is affected)
• in a small number of cases the result will identify that flood information is unavailable. This is because the Environment Agency flood data may not include floodplain information for the land you have searched. If this happens a full refund will be offered.

Please see: What do I do to get a refund when a Flood Risk Indicator result does not reveal any information about floodplains?

The Environment Agency's flood data includes flooding from all rivers with a catchment size greater than 3 km², and all flooding from the sea (both along the open coast and tidal estuaries). Smaller rivers are included in the assessment where they fall within the area that could be affected by an extreme flood (0.1 percent chance in any year). The assessment takes into account the type, location and condition of flood defences.

Flooding can occur from other sources such as groundwater and surface water runoff, highway drains and sewers but flooding from these sources is not taken into account.

For further information see Environment Agency website

The method used to produce the Environment Agency flood data (NaFRA 2008) has been developed specifically to enable the Environment Agency to include other types or forms of flooding in our flood risk assessments in the future.

However, they ensure that data of flooding from these other sources is available across England and Wales in order for them to calculate the probability and consequences of these types of floods.

For further information see Environment Agency website