Halliwell Fire Research, the UK arm of forensic and technical consultancy Halliwell Global, has warned that the UK is underprepared for wildfire and wildland-urban interface (WUI) risk as incidents grow more frequent and the conditions driving them intensify.
An active wildfire season has coincided with a UK property insurance market under pressure from extreme weather. 2025 was the UK's worst year for wildfires on record, with more than 47,879 hectares burned, according to satellite data from the Global Wildfire Information System, surpassing the previous 2019 record by more than 19,000 hectares and recording the highest number of fires larger than 30 hectares since 2012.
UK insurers paid out a record £6.1 billion in property claims that year, with domestic subsidence payouts rising 10% to £307 million, their highest level on record, after the Met Office confirmed summer 2025 was the UK's hottest on record, according to Association of British Insurers (ABI) data.
Nadia Mofidi, principal and head of UK & EU at Halliwell Fire Research, said ignition sources vary widely, from industrial incidents to garden equipment and discarded materials, but the underlying vulnerability is consistent, namely, dry soil, desiccated vegetation, and urban areas bordering open land without adequate protection.
Early findings from the soil moisture strand, led by Judy Sedgewick, show a 58% alignment between drought conditions identified by the model and recorded summer wildfire events, with risk concentrated in southern and southwestern England. Soil moisture loss builds slowly, often over years, before a heatwave creates the conditions for a significant fire, said Mofidi.
Subsidence, not wildfire, has so far been the more immediate underwriting concern from repeated summer heat. Some insurers have responded to successive subsidence surge years with tighter acceptance criteria and higher excesses in higher-risk postcodes, while wildfire has remained a peripheral peril for mainstream property underwriters, even as isolated incidents have triggered business interruption claims where fire has caused road closures, power outages or restricted access.
That could change quickly. The Prudential Regulation Authority launched its General Insurance Stress Test in May 2026 to press firms on climate-driven property exposure, and Deloitte has forecast UK home insurers will swing to a net loss in 2026, with the combined ratio reaching 102.1%, as storm, flood and subsidence claims continue to build.
Against that backdrop, wildfire is one more peril insurers are being asked to account for explicitly.
A central concern raised by the research is the absence of a national wildfire prediction system, coordinated fire service training for WUI events, and building codes for at-risk areas.
Mofidi said the National Fire Chiefs Council has introduced wildfire guidance and awareness training, but its pace and scale will need to increase as incidents grow more frequent and complex near open land, noting that fire services in Wales and Scotland have more experience through historical exposure to moorland and hillside fires, while expertise in England remains more focused on single-building fires.
The UK also lacks the building regulation requirements found in more established wildfire-exposed markets such as Australia, Canada and the United States, where at-risk homeowners must typically maintain defensible space around properties and construction standards govern the fire resistance of roofs, windows and fencing. That gap in codified standards is precisely what leaves the training and prediction shortfalls with so little to build on - without defensible-space requirements or fire-resistant construction rules to enforce, fire services and modellers alike are working without the baseline data those other markets have accumulated over decades.
"For the insurance industry in particular, this is a risk that is currently very difficult to price or model in the UK, because the underlying data simply does not yet exist at scale," Mofidi said. "That gap matters, both for insurers and for the policyholders who assume they are adequately covered for events that no-one has properly assessed."
Wildfires in Spain and France this summer illustrate what an underpriced peril can cost. Morningstar DBRS has warned the ultimate insurance impact of such events hinges on whether flames reach densely populated areas rather than total area burned. Spain's 2025 fire season, its worst in three decades at almost 355,000 hectares burned, caused close to €5 billion in economic losses but well under €1 billion in insured payments, an illustration of how far exposure can outrun coverage when a peril remains poorly modelled.
For UK insurers, the data gaps Halliwell's research aims to fill raise a wider question about how prepared the market is to price a peril that has so far sat behind subsidence and flood in underwriting priority.
With regulators pressing insurers on climate-driven exposure and home insurers facing a projected underwriting loss in 2026, wildfire looks increasingly like one more variable underwriters will need to account for, whether or not the data to do so reliably exists yet.
