Tom Flack seems to have misunderstood me in the piece entitled "Flood benefit call for low income households", (News Analysis,10 May).
I have never suggested that housing benefit should be extended just to pay for flood insurance, that would be silly and would lead to all sorts of problems.
What I am talking about is extending benefit to pay the premium for payment with rent schemes for social housing, which provide full standard household contents cover.
These schemes are suffering from low take-up rates following the transfer of ownership to housing associations which are less concerned about collecting the premium than when local authorities were responsible.
I would have thought Royal & SunAlliance as a market leader in this field would be pleased to see a mechanism for increasing take-up rates on these excellent schemes to reduce adverse selection.
I have been advocating this since 2003 as you can see from Technical Paper 1 on the benfieldhrc.org website.
David Crichton, Visiting professor, Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre
