Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis (pictured), who has staked much of his tenure on overhauling the state's insurance market took the state's insurance recovery story to London this week, meeting Lloyd's of London leadership and City of London officials as part of a broader UK trade mission - a trip that doubled as a pitch to reinsurance capital just as Florida's once-battered property market shows its clearest signs yet of stabilising.
DeSantis and Florida Insurance Commissioner Mike Yaworsky spent the day meeting Lloyd's leadership, floating a possible research tie-up between the state and the Lloyd's Lab innovation incubator, before capping the visit with a fireside chat alongside the Lady Mayor of the City of London, Dame Susan Langley. The discussions built on a Memorandum of Understanding Florida signed with the UK in November 2023, itself a follow-on from DeSantis's first London trip in April that year.
Florida International University president Jeanette Nuñez also joined the talks to showcase the university's Wall of Wind facility, which the state says is the only university-run site in the country capable of simulating Category 5 hurricane winds against full-scale structures, alongside FIU's Florida Public Hurricane Loss Model used to estimate storm-related insurance losses.
The timing isn't incidental. Florida's property insurance market spent the better part of a decade as a byword for dysfunction - a period Governor DeSantis and Commissioner Yaworsky are increasingly keen to contrast with where the market stands today, and London's reinsurance capital is a natural audience for that pitch.
At its worst, more than a dozen Florida property insurers became insolvent or stopped writing new business, and the state's insurer of last resort, Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, swelled to roughly 1.4 million policies by late 2023 as private carriers retreated. Litigation was the deeper structural problem: Florida accounted for roughly 7-8% of the country's homeowners' insurance claims but as much as 76-80% of related lawsuits nationwide, a mismatch regulators and insurers pointed to for years as the root of runaway premiums.
The state's response came in two legislative waves. A December 2022 special session produced Senate Bill 2A, which eliminated one-way attorney fees in property claims - a rule that had let plaintiffs' lawyers recover fees from insurers regardless of how a case was ultimately resolved - and banned the assignment-of-benefits practices that had fuelled a wave of contractor-driven litigation. Follow-up legislation in 2023, House Bill 837 and Senate Bill 7052, tightened bad-faith standards and gave insurers a safe harbour to tender policy limits within 90 days. Lawmakers also layered on reinsurance support, including the Florida Optional Reinsurance Assistance program, alongside continued funding for the My Safe Florida Home scheme that subsidises wind-mitigation retrofits for homeowners.
By most of the metrics Florida's own regulators track, the reforms have done what they were designed to do. Citizens' policy count has fallen from its 2023 peak of roughly 1.4 million to somewhere in the region of 270,000-400,000 depending on the month cited, marking its lowest level in 14 years. Personal insurance litigation filings fell 23% between 2023 and 2024 and by a further quarter in 2025, according to state officials, as private insurers absorbed policies the state-backed carrier once had to underwrite, driving Citizens' enrollment down sharply over the same period.
Seventeen new insurers had entered the Florida market since the reforms took effect as of DeSantis's January 2026 rate-relief announcement, and further carriers have since secured regulatory approval to write business in the state as that competitive picture keeps building through 2026. Citizens itself has been able to buy cheaper reinsurance as its exposure has shrunk - DeSantis said in June that this year's placement cost around 30% less than the year before, helping fund what he called the biggest rate reduction in the programme's history. That followed an 8.7% average statewide cut to Citizens premiums taking effect at spring 2026 renewals, with over 150,000 policyholders seeing reductions of 10% or more.
It hasn't all been a straight line down. Citizens raised rates for most policyholders in 2025 even as DeSantis publicly cited pending decreases, and insurers and consumer advocates have continued to disagree over how quickly savings are reaching homeowners. Analysts are also flagging that the recovery's next test may not be hurricanes at all - Florida is currently experiencing its worst drought in more than 25 years, with a rising wildfire count, a shift one industry briefing warned could test the state's reform gains in a different way than the litigation and storm losses that caused the original crisis. But the broader trend - new capital entering, litigation falling, the state-backed insurer shrinking - is now well enough established that DeSantis and Yaworsky are using it as the centrepiece of an international pitch, rather than a defensive talking point.
The insurance meetings were one part of a longer Florida trade mission to the UK, which also included the fifth UK-Florida MOU Working Group Meeting covering aerospace, aviation, life sciences and emerging technology, alongside separate engagements tied to the Farnborough International Airshow. For the insurance and reinsurance sector specifically, the message from the Florida delegation was straightforward: a market that international capital pulled back from a few years ago is now, in the state's telling, one worth re-engaging with - and Lloyd's, as one of the world's oldest and largest specialist insurance markets, remains a first port of call for that conversation.
