Residents of Bowral in the Southern Highlands of NSW have voiced concerns that new floodplain data will make them uninsurable, but the Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) says it’s unlikely the residents’ policies will change much at all.

Last week the residents complained that almost 500 homes that were previously considered safe from flooding had been added to the “flood affected” list under the draft Bowral Floodplain Risk Management Plan for the Mittagong Creek. The study is part of the NSW Government’s Flood Prone Land Policy, which is an ongoing project to collect better floodplain data.

But ICA spokesman Rod Frail says insurers probably knew which policyholders were in flood prone areas through their own research, and it’s unlikely these homeowners would have had riverine flood damage included in their policies in the first place.

Mr Frail says ICA is “all for any move by councils to collect more flood data information”, but whether or not this information will be passed on by all councils – like it was in Bowral ­– remains to be seen.

While not much has been said about NSW’s Flood Prone Land Policy, industry sources say there’s nothing new in the policy, and the Council of Australian Governments has been urging state and territory governments to provide flood reports sooner rather than later.