Flood risk, material information, and the guidance nobody replaced

A quick note first. This is general information to help you brief whoever builds your website and to prompt a conversation with your own adviser, not legal advice. The flood certificate pilots described here are an England matter; the consumer protection duties apply across the UK. Two judgements in this piece are ours rather than anyone official's: that a priced listing is an invitation to purchase, and that the withdrawn guidance is still the best available description of reasonable practice. Both are widely held. Neither is authority.

On 13 October 2026 Defra and Flood Re announced Flood Performance Certificates. The press release says they "will be piloted to provide clear, standardised information on flood risk and resilience", that the aim is for them to become "a trusted source of information, similar to how Energy Performance Certificates are for energy", and that pilots "will start this year in areas at risk of flooding" with more "throughout 2027 and beyond".

It is a genuinely good idea and we will come back to it. But an agent reading that and wondering where a new certificate would sit on a property page is asking the second question first.

The first question is what your listings say about flooding today, and by what authority.

The guidance went, and nothing replaced it

If your listings describe flood risk in a consistent way, the odds are they follow the National Trading Standards Estate and Letting Agency Team's material information guidance. Part A arrived in 2022, Parts B and C in November 2023. Part C is where flooding lives.

The November 2023 documents are no longer published.

The reason is clean enough. They were built on the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008, and those were revoked by section 251(1) of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, which commenced on 6 April 2025. Transitional savings keep one part of the old regulations alive for the redress provisions, but the material information basis went: the guidance took its definition from regulation 6(3) of a statutory instrument that no longer exists.

What makes this worth writing about is not the withdrawal. It is that nothing announced it and nothing replaced it.

There is no withdrawal notice on the National Trading Standards site. The news article of 30 November 2023 announcing the guidance is still published, still links the guidance files, and still tells agents they are "already obliged under the Consumer Protection Regulations (CPRs) not to omit any material information on property listings". Click one of those links today and you do not get an error. You get the live material information page, which carries no guidance documents on it at all. The files have been removed and the old addresses quietly resolve to a page that no longer has them.

The 2022 Part A material is still served, which makes the gap easy to miss: a link that works is not the same as a document that is still there.

No official notice announced any of this, and no source gives it a date. Propertymark reported it on 9 May 2025, describing a quiet withdrawal that coincided with the commencement of the new Act on 6 April 2025. Worth stating plainly, because it is the weakest link in this story and you should know where it comes from.

Meanwhile:

1. The government has said so itself. The MHCLG consultation page on material information states that "no sector-specific guidance has been produced since the DMCCA (Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024) has come into effect".

2. The Competition and Markets Authority has been asked for sector guidance and has refused. It took direct enforcement powers on the same day the old regulations died. Its published summary of responses of 18 November 2025 records a property sector respondent arguing that "property listings should not be considered an invitation to purchase", and answers that "the CMA does not consider it appropriate to provide further sector-specific guidance on these issues". It adds that "there are no sectoral exceptions to the price transparency requirements", that it "has no power to apply such an exemption", and that the invitation to purchase concept "is intentionally broad".

3. MHCLG promised replacement guidance in June 2026. The home buying and selling reform roadmap commits the government to "publish non-statutory guidance later this year", and says "stakeholders should have regard for the guidance as soon as it is published". The Written Ministerial Statement of 22 June 2026 put it in terms: "we will publish non-statutory material information guidance later this year". As at late October 2026 it has not appeared.

So for about eighteen months, agents have had a statutory duty, an active regulator, and no material information guidance at all.

What actually binds now, and it is stricter

The duty did not soften when the old regulations went. It moved, and in one respect it got harder.

Three provisions matter. Section 226 of the 2024 Act covers misleading actions, including "the provision of false or misleading information relating to a product, a trader or any other matter relevant to a transactional decision". Section 227 covers misleading omissions, and defines material information as "information that the average consumer needs to take an informed transactional decision". Section 230 is the one most often missed: omission of material information from an invitation to purchase.

Here is the part that should change how you think about a listing page. Under section 225(4), a practice is unfair if a misleading action or omission is likely to cause the average consumer to take a different decision, or if it omits material information from an invitation to purchase, or if it is in the banned list. The second of those carries no test of effect at all. The CMA puts it in one sentence in its November 2025 guidance: "The omission of material information from an invitation to purchase is an unfair practice regardless of whether it is likely to impact a consumer's transactional decision."

Our reading, and we are not alone in it, is that a property listing carrying a price will ordinarily be an invitation to purchase. The CMA's own description of the concept as "intentionally broad" points the same way.

Two qualifications, because they cut in opposite directions and the commentary tends to blur both.

Section 230(2) sets out a defined list of what an invitation to purchase must contain: the main characteristics, the total price, the trader's identity and address, delivery charges, cancellation rights, and, at limb (j), any other information the trader must give under another enactment. Flood risk is not on that list by name. It reaches a listing either as part of the "main characteristics" of the property, or through the general misleading omission duty in section 227, or through section 226 if what you have written is actively misleading.

Section 230(1) then softens it. Whether information has been omitted is judged having regard to the limitations of the medium, what the trader does to overcome them, and whether the information is already apparent from the context. A portal card is not a brochure and the law knows it.

So what goes on the listing

With no replacement guidance published, the withdrawn document remains the best available description of reasonable practice. The definition of material information it was written against has carried over almost word for word into section 227(2), and the invitation to purchase limb is tougher than anything it was drafted for. That is our reading rather than advice. The CMA's own letting agent guidance is still on gov.uk, but it predates the 2024 Act, is flagged as not updated for it, and says nothing about flooding.

What Part C said was that "any known flooding history or significant risk of flooding is material information", and that a listing should carry "an accurate description or statement as to any known risk of, or actual, flooding at the property". It asked three questions: has the property flooded in the last five years, what are the sources of risk, and are there flood or sea defences.

Where there is a flooding history it set a minimum: when it flooded, covering all events; how often; the source, whether river, groundwater, sea or other; what has been done to the property since; and whether there are known difficulties getting insurance because of it.

Coastal erosion sat separately, and on the same footing.

Two things follow for a website rather than for a compliance file: those five points need somewhere structured to live, and the sources of risk need naming separately. Both come back below.

The FPC, and the document that will mislead you about it

Back to the certificate.

What has actually been announced is pilots. The release says the "final design, content and format is still being developed". It says Flood Re is introducing them, but introducing a pilot is not the same as issuing a certificate, and no issuing body has been named. The data standard prepared for Flood Re by RAB Consultants in April 2026 sets out assessment levels, and against one of them notes that the required competency of a trained assessor is "yet to be defined".

No obligation to obtain one has been announced, and the honest phrasing is exactly that rather than "voluntary", because the official wording uses neither word. Flood Re said in July 2026 that it will introduce premium discounts for households that obtain an FPC or complete an equivalent self-assessment, which reads more like an incentive than a requirement, though that is a reading rather than a statement of status.

Now the trap.

Flood Re published a report in December 2020, also called Flood Performance Certificates, which is still on its website at an obvious address and may well outrank the announcement in a search. It was written by WPI Economics, commissioned by Flood Re, and it recommends to government that display of an FPC "should be mandated on the sale or rental of any domestic property in the UK". It sets out a timetable: a voluntary scheme from 2022, free surveys for high risk homes from 2024, mandatory for new builds and major alterations in 2026, and mandatory for the sale or rental of any home in 2028.

None of that has happened. It was a consultancy's recommendation to government in 2020, it carries no government endorsement that we could find, and the October 2026 announcement describes pilots and an unfinished design. Read as a current timetable it says certificates become compulsory within a couple of years, which nothing in the announcement supports.

Six things worth doing on the website

1. Make flood a field, not a sentence. If the only place flooding appears is inside a paragraph somebody typed, it cannot be checked, cannot be exported, and will not survive a change of staff. A field can be audited across every listing in an afternoon.

2. Carry the five points where there is a history. When it flooded, how often, the source, what has been done since, and whether insurance has been difficult. That is the withdrawn guidance's own minimum, and with nothing official to replace it, it is the most considered description of the content anyone has published.

3. Name the sources of risk rather than the word "flooding". Rivers or sea, surface water, groundwater, reservoirs and sewers are different problems with different consequences, and the new certificate's own data standard separates them.

4. Be careful with insurance and mortgage wording. Saying a property is insurable, mortgageable or covered by Flood Re asserts something about that property, and the CMA's guidance is that a factual claim should be supported by evidence, with the regulator or a court entitled to treat an unevidenced claim as false. Flood Re eligibility is genuinely complicated, excludes homes built on or after 1 January 2009, and the scheme has a planned end in 2039.

5. No badges until there is something to badge. When FPCs arrive there will be a temptation to put a rating or a logo on a listing. Displaying a trust mark without the necessary authorisation is on the banned list in the 2024 Act, as is claiming approval or endorsement by a body that has not given it, or that has given it on terms you are not meeting. The banned list needs no proof that anyone was harmed.

6. Leave a slot for a document that does not exist yet. The EPC has a place on a property page because somebody built one. If your estate agency website cannot take a second certificate without a redevelopment, better to know that before one arrives than after.

The short version

A new flood certificate is coming slowly and nobody has to do anything about it yet.

The guidance that told you how to describe flooding on a listing has gone, the duty behind it got stricter rather than softer, and the replacement has been promised but not published.

Those two facts are the wrong way round in most people's heads, and only one of them is urgent.