The objective of this project was to improve our understanding of flood insurance for SMEs, and to establish if SMEs have flood insurance problems, and if so, how they could be overcome and which other risk management strategies could be available for SMEs.  
 
Which is the situation that SMEs are facing, the challenges and problems around insurance? 

Which other risk management strategies (financial and practical) SMEs employ at the moment to manage the impacts of flooding, and which other opportunities might be available to them? 

Overall, this project aims to provide new evidence on the risk management strategies that SMEs have to manage flooding, including insurance. By doing so, we will contribute to the development of a flood protection policy framework that increase the resilience of this backbone of the economy. 

This research followed a mixed-method approach with quantitative and qualitative data that could provide a broader view of the situation of SMEs. On the one hand, to fulfil objective (I) an online survey was developed targeting affected businesses in flooded regions across UK. The unit of analysis were small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), understood as that type of organisation that employs up to 250 employees. We made a distinction within this category to provide more granularity in the results to acknowledge the different resources that micro firms have over medium ones. The data was collected between March and August 2018, and are businesses from different parts of the country. We acknowledge that the quantitative results do not represent a statistically significant sample of the whole country. Qualitative interviews provided a deeper understanding of the issues that SMEs are facing across the country, specifically the barriers and opportunities of insurance as a risk management strategy and other innovative strategies, which is the sub-objective (II) of this research. In this sense, the qualitative data comprise 38 semi-structured interviews carried out mainly over the phone.

A reaction workshop was conducted with the aim of sharing the results of the research and receive feedback of the work and which recommendatiosn should be put forward. The workshop was called “Building a Framework for Flood Risk Management for SMEs”. It took place at the University of Leeds on 16th April 2018. It consisted of 9 participants from various stakeholder organisations: academia, local authorities, national government officials, insurers and community organisations.