The Director General of the Council of Mortgage Lenders was talking about the scenes of heavy flooding in the South East, South West, East Anglia, and the Midlands. As a result he found himself under pressure from those on the receiving end to say what might happen to their homes if they proved uninsurable and therefore impossible to sell on.
Coogan, however, was a little more sensitive to their plight than some of the reports implied. His focus was those houses in high risk areas where there was little prospect of mitigating the flood risk. According to the CML the number of homes in this category is likely to be small though no absolute numbers exist. For those, he suggested that a government scheme similar to its Homeswap scheme might be applied. Homeswap is aimed at helping owner-occupiers trapped by negative equity in blighted low-demand areas and allows then to move into another property.
