By developed-world standards, and particularly for a country with such a benign climate, the recent flooding has caused hardship on quite a large scale.

At the same time, some people will inevitably benefit from it. Most of that is entirely legitimate: builders and repairers, suppliers of food and goods to replace what’s been damaged/lost, etc - all indirect beneficiaries whose markets suddenly grew.

Will there also be direct beneficiaries? Well, there’s financial and political capital to be had. There’s damage and dilapidations, both preexisting and caused by the flood. Large figures are floating around: estimates for total damage, insurance payouts, uninsured losses, and state help (taxpayer payouts). The latter is the most controversial, with politicians and other representatives of the affected areas staking out their claims.

First up was about a month ago when Yorkshire caught the brunt of the first round of flooding. The prime minister announced help for the afflicted areas, and someone from Hull (Mayor? Council leader?) complained bitterly that it was utterly inadequate. That’s reasonable: it’s his business to get the best deal he can for his city, and he’d be failing in that if he sounded satisfied when he judged he could hope for more. Today we had a councillor for Gloucestershire telling us road repairs alone would cost £25M in her county. Same story: she wants the best she can get for her area.  And they all want to stake out positions.

All of which begs the question: what is insurance supposed to be for, if the taxpayer is going to fork up when a disaster happens? And why is a victim of flooding more deserving of being bailed out than a victim of vandalism, burglary or fire? Could it be because it’s a public/media event, and politicians need to be seen to do something? What, me, cynical?

Well, if I were from the insurance industry, I’d be looking at policies with explicit exclusions for large-scale natural disasters, on the grounds that there’s public money to cover them. Save a fortune!

Where there’s public money, corruption inevitably follows. The representatives of Hull, Gloucestershire and other affected areas have legitimate needs, but how could they resist the temptation to absorb at least some general backlogs in repairs and maintenance into the cleanup budgets? Shortfalls in funding - real or manufactured - may then become a convenient scapegoat for general failings.

And if there’s a hardship fund for uninsured individuals, the same applies. The insurance industry has ways (albeit imperfect) to detect and deter fraud. Taxpayer-funded schemes lack the expertise and manpower to detect either fraud or real hardship, so it’ll be the professional con-men who stand to benefit most from public money.

That at least could be alleviated if distribution of the public funds was outsourced to the insurance industry. Except of course, they’re already working flat out to deal with their own business.

For the second time this season, parts of England have got floods. This time the southwestern Midlands, including our biggest river the Severn, is at the heart of it, and some of the pictures are quite impressive.

Here in West Devon, our weather has been more moderate. On a narrow peninsula surrounded by the warm waters of the gulf stream, it’s always moderate. We have neither hot summers nor cold winters. Normal rainfall is above average for the country, but Dartmoor has ample capacity to soak it up. Our rivers are too small to build up big floods.

The biggest river locally is the Tamar, which marks the cornish border. It actually did flood a few years ago (this century:-), though the floods were not on a large scale by national, let alone world standards. At the nearest point, Gunnislake, it runs through a deep and steep wooded valley, and can rise quite a long way in exceptional conditions.

And there are old cottages along the river, that are flood-prone. Indeed, they’re built for it, with things like flagstone floors downstairs, as well as stone walls. The original occupants will have taken occasional flooding for granted, and expected to deal with it.

What should we learn from history? We have a lot of houses built in flood-prone areas: that’s not about to change, though some of them may benefit from new flood-defences. But they fall into two categories: those built to deal with it (the older ones), and those build with no regard to their surroundings (those from the past century or so).

What can owners of unfit houses do to minimise the impact of flooding on their homes? I don’t know, but it’s a question we should be asking.

One useful thing that could go into “Home Information Packs” would be not just a flood risk figure, but also an assessment of a house’s fitness to withstand flooding. That would tend to put some kind of market pressure on builders to do a better job, as well as informing buyers.