Small and medium-sized businesses remain significantly underprotected against the financial and operational impacts of terrorism, according to a new report from Pool Re. It says terrorism cover is still absent from most commercial property policies despite the persistence of an evolving threat landscape.

Pool Re’s new paper, The Threat Posed to Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises, sets out practical steps that firms can take to strengthen preparedness. The organisation stresses the need to reinstate terrorism cover as a standard feature of commercial property insurance if the UK is to improve the continuity prospects of smaller businesses.

Tom Clementi, Pool Re chief executive officer, said: “When Pool Re was set up in 1993, our mandate from government was to make terrorism cover accessible and affordable for all businesses in Britain. However, with estimates that only 5% of SMEs are covered today, there is clearly some way to go. Thanks to our modernised reinsurance scheme introduced in April 2025, we are now in a position to offer our members significant discounts to reinsure their SME portfolios where they can demonstrate they have reintegrated terrorism cover into their commercial property policies for SMEs as a matter of standard practice.

“If members reintegrate cover at scale, which over time we are confident they will, the UK’s economic resilience to terrorism will have been significantly bolstered and the market will have been returned to the position it found itself in prior to the IRA’s mainland bombing campaign of the early 1990s.”

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