Top 20 Places Most At Risk Of Flooding

Research has identified the top 20 places in Britain most at risk from flooding, with more than half of homeowners facing the threat in the worst affected area.

Channel 4's Dispatches, "Britain Under Water" reports that an increasing number of new homes are being built on Britain's floodplains .It identifies Boston in Lincolnshire as being at most risk for flooding with 57% of homeowners being at "significant risk".

In the programme, the chief executive of the Environment Agency, Baroness Young, calls on insurers to refuse insurance to houses built on floodplains against advice."Many of the properties that flooded in the summer were built in the 60s and 70s and the 80s and we've got a huge backlog of that in the floodplain now and we don't want to increase that by building any more. We'd like the ABI to be tougher ,we'd like the insurance companies to be tougher and to simply refuse to insure properties built on the floodplain against our advice. But we've not persuaded the insurance industry en masse to do that."

In Boston, a market town with a population of around 65,000, 15,906 homes are placed in a high risk category, Windsor and Maidenhead are second on the list with one in five homeowners face the same level of danger.