A grass fire tore through streets in Stourbridge last week. A wind-driven blaze reached the Croatian tourist town of Omis, injuring three dozen people. In France's Landes region, 525 residents of the village of Luglon were moved out of their homes as a new fire crept to within two kilometres of the centre. In western Germany, around 1,800 people left the village of Gey near the Belgian border, with firefighters held back at points by unexploded Second World War munitions buried in the forest floor. In northern Spain, an emergency military team carried the remains of three 11th-century kings of Aragón out of a monastery under threat from flames, moving them to a museum in Huesca for safekeeping.
Five countries made headlines in one week, for the same root cause. For UK brokers it's important to realise what a summer like this does to pricing, capacity and cover over the next few renewal cycles.
London recorded 38.1°C on Thursday, its hottest day of the year, and the West Midlands took the worst of what followed. Six separate wildfires broke out within hours of each other across Stourbridge, Stoke-on-Trent, Birmingham, Warwickshire and Worcestershire. West Midlands Fire Service's chief fire officer, Simon Tuhill, called it one of the most significant incidents his service has dealt with. Around 19 people needed hospital treatment, according to the ambulance service, and the National Fire Chiefs Council says England and Wales have now logged more than 1,000 wildfires this year - more of them landing closer to towns and cities than insurers had assumed.
That fits a pattern the Met Office has been logging all summer. England and Wales have just had their driest July since national rainfall records began in 1836, with southern England recording its driest calendar month on record. Layer in the fourth heatwave of the year and most of the country's ground is bone dry heading into autumn.
The same day brought a second, separate headache: a Southern Rail service derailed near Lewes in East Sussex after three rear carriages left the tracks and rolled down an embankment. Around 150 passengers were on board; 20 were taken to hospital, two seriously hurt. Investigators haven't confirmed a cause, but photographs from the scene appear to show buckled rail, and the timing - the same afternoon as the region's hottest temperatures of the year - has already prompted scrutiny of rail operators' liability cover. Licensed operators are required to hold third-party liability insurance of at least £155 million per occurrence.
The Croatian, French, German and Spanish fires aren't background noise to the UK story - they're the same market. The Omis fire put 36 people in front of ambulance crews and forced roughly 1,000 people from their homes on Croatia's Dalmatian coast. The Landes fire near Bordeaux followed an earlier blaze in the same region that had already pushed a quarter of a million people out of their homes. Moody's Ratings has said France and Spain between them lost more than 175,000 hectares of land to fire in a single week in late July, equivalent to roughly 40% of what both countries burned across the whole of 2025.
For UK insurers without direct exposure on the continent, the relevance is capital, not claims. A meaningful share of UK property risk is reinsured through the same European and global treaty markets now absorbing these losses, and the case for reassessing wildfire as a UK peril in its own right has been building since the French and Spanish fires first spiked in July.
The numbers underneath it:
Domestically, the more immediate underwriting pressure is coming from the ground rather than the flames. Insurers including Ecclesiastical have started treating subsidence and wildfire as a single, compounding exposure in drought-hit postcodes, and that's already showing up in the claims data: UK subsidence claims are reported to have reached roughly £225 million in the first half of the year, with the average settled Q2 claim hitting a record £20,000. Add a projected net underwriting loss across UK home insurers this year - Deloitte has put the expected combined ratio at 102.1% - and it's clearer why the Prudential Regulation Authority's climate-focused stress test, launched in May, has landed at an uncomfortable moment for the market.
Brokers have a practical window to act here rather than waiting for the next renewal to expose a gap: checking whether wildfire sits explicitly within property wordings or falls into a grey area around fire exclusions; reviewing excess structures for clients on clay soils or near heathland; and flagging business interruption exposure where a fire closes a road, cuts power or restricts access for days without ever reaching a client's premises. Recent broker guidance on UK wildfire risk has made the same point: get clients talking to insurers before a fire, not during one.
Travel cover looks steadier. Collinson's head of travel insurance, Greg Lawson, says the wildfires in Spain and France haven't produced a meaningful jump in enquiry volumes from UK travellers, with most questions centred on whether Foreign Office advice might change mid-trip rather than on claims themselves.
Wildfire isn't about to overtake flood or subsidence as the UK market's dominant peril, not this year and probably not next. But last week gave the industry a compressed, five-country preview of what a longer fire season does to reinsurance capacity, property wordings and broker workload all at once. With rain in short supply and a fifth heatwave not ruled out, the real test for underwriters is how quickly pricing and cover catch up with a risk that's already arrived.
