Mostly no, and the exceptions are specific rather than general. This is a town on top of a hill, which settles the question for a great many of its houses before anyone opens a map. The flood zones cover a sliver of the area. The recorded history involves a watercourse overtopping, not a river swallowing a street. The risk here is a handful of addresses in the valley bottoms, not a town with a problem.
For flooding from rivers and the sea, the Environment Agency's mapping puts 1% of the area's postcodes in flood zone 3 and 1% in flood zone 2. Those are exclusive bands rather than nested ones: zone 3 is the higher-probability core, and zone 2 is the additional medium-probability fringe sitting outside it, which is why the two can read the same size. Either way, 98% of postcodes here sit outside both.
Surface water is not measured on the same scale, and the honest local picture comes from what has actually happened. Four flood events appear on the recorded register for this area, the most recent in November 2000, caused by an ordinary watercourse exceeding its channel capacity with no raised defences in place. Historic flood outlines touch 2% of the area. In hill country with steep lanes and small streams, that is the shape the risk takes: fast local water in the bottom of a valley after heavy rain, rather than a slow regional flood.
Looking forward, the Environment Agency's climate-adjusted zone covers 4% of postcodes, which is a wider footprint than today's zones but still a small minority of the area. It is a modelled allowance rather than a prediction of any particular flood.
For insurance, the practical effect is that most buyers here will find flood cover unremarkable and priced accordingly, while a small number of properties in the valley bottoms will find it is the first thing an underwriter asks about. That distinction is address-specific, not town-specific, and it is worth an indicative quote before instructing a solicitor rather than after.
Broadening out to all indicators together, including surface water alongside rivers and sea, 8% of the area's postcodes carry a high rating on at least one measure, 5% a medium one and 17% a low one. Those bands overlap with the flood zones above rather than sitting alongside them, so they are a different way of looking at the same water, not an additional layer of it.
The count of homes is the more useful number. Across the postcodes that carry any rivers-and-sea risk at all, and only those postcodes appear in the mapping, 347 properties are listed: 17 at high risk, 8 at medium and 12 at low. Three of the high-risk properties are residential. That is a small enough figure to be an address list rather than a statistic, which is exactly how a buyer should treat it.
On whether anything stands between the water and the house, 1% of postcodes sit in the high-risk extent with a defence present in the model and 1% in the high-risk extent with none. Presence of a defence in a model is not a guarantee of protection; it means a structure exists in the modelling, with its own design standard and its own failure point, and it should never be read as an all-clear.
Sea level is largely an academic question for a town on a hill twenty miles inland, but for completeness, the nearest tide gauge at Devonport has recorded a rise of about 2.35 millimetres a year over its 1962 to 2015 record. That is a measured historic rate at the coast, not a forecast for anywhere here.
Flood risk in this area is middling in the way that most of rural Devon is middling: unremarkable across the great bulk of it, genuinely serious for a very small number of properties near water. Put the exact address into the Environment Agency's long-term flood risk service before you commit, because the town-level answer and the house-level answer are not the same answer.