A recent report from Synthetik Insurance Technologies highlighted the potential for losses from strikes, riots and civil commotion (SRCC) to spread across the UK, with some simulated scenarios taking losses in excess of £4bn.
The report takes the form of four trigger-based vignettes or modeling scenarios. These are based on protests around shelter hotels in the UK in 2025 and represent four risks affecting UK SRCC exposure: local flashpoints; policing legitimacy; overseas conflict and domestic mobilization; and macro-financial pressures. The scenarios were modeled using Synthetik’s platform srccQuantum.
Synthetik believes that the surge in the number of protests has put pressure on policing, traffic and retail security, while there is also the risk that marches will descend into opportunistic chaos. These structural and behavioral factors can cause events to quickly scale up and evolve into multi-center riots.
The report outlines three key issues that carriers and brokers should be aware of, including the non-linear expansion of losses when riot routes are clustered near dense retail, policing and transportation hubs. Route and corridor risks are therefore critical to understanding worst-case loss outcomes.
Synthetik also emphasizes that event duration may be as important as severity, underscoring the need for strict event definition and temporal aggregation awareness in SRCC underwriting.
Additionally, regional towns represent a layer of accumulated risk, particularly in commuter belts.
Tim Brewer, Founder and COO of Synthetik, commented: “SRCC in the UK has evolved from background risk to path-based accumulation risk, which is critical for accurate monitoring. The severity and spread of losses depend on how civil unrest manifests itself in different spaces, creating concentration of risk that may not be apparent in more generic approaches such as concentric rings. For underwriters and brokers, this represents a significant change in how risk is priced, monitored and accumulated across portfolios.”
