WHEN is someone in the higher echelons of this country going to get a grip on flooding? A proper, really tight, bruise-inducing grip.

A grip that once and for all will properly address what your average flood plain dweller has for years been warning about until they’re blue in the face and awash in their wellies – that flooding in the UK is getting worse. Much worse.

Successive governments have been caught napping time after time. It’s taken the current lot weeks to recognise the plight of the folk on the Somerset Levels and then they messed up Westminster’s response with finger pointing and backside covering. Fiddling while Somerset drowned, as it were.

Mind you, they were pretty quick off the mark when the mighty Thames started pouring into houses in Tory voter heartlands close to the capital and sent in the troops. But we’ll not mention, shall we, that instead of being confined to barracks the soldiers were confined to their buses because someone, somewhere didn’t think to bring their waders and wellies.

Every time somewhere floods, politicians appear to go through stages of disinterest, apathy and a councils-should-just-on-with-sorting-it sort of approach while the media commandeer helicopters and grab footage of towns and villages under water exhorting us almost with surprise to “look at that!”.

But as anyone who lives in the York area, never mind the Somerset Levels or anywhere else where we see large scale flooding, will robustly tell the likes of Eric Pickles, we’ve been here before. Many, many times.

In recent times, the York area floods of January 1982 were estimated to have caused £2 million worth of damage, with about 540 homes and businesses affected and more than 17,000 hectares of surrounding farmland under water. York was under water again in 1991 and 1995, with both floods triggered by heavy rainfall on snow covered catchment land above the Ouse basin.

November 2000 saw the worst flooding in York for 400 years, with the city being just two inches away from disaster as floodwaters peaked and an estimated 3,000 people were made temporarily homeless. And guess what? The politicians were at it then too. Deputy PM John Prescott flew in by helicopter and pledged to increase and speed up payments to local authorities to help pay for damage.

He promised an additional £51 million for improving flood defences over the following four years with more money to be spent on research into climate change and global warming. Clearly, given what's happened since then it wasn’t enough...

The floods of 2007 cost 13 people their lives and the economy £3.2bn. An estimated 48,000 homes were affected with each costing between £20,000 and £30,000 to repair – which makes the £5,000 offered last week by David Cameron to affected homes and businesses to prevent future flooding, a mere drop in the stinking, stagnant flood ocean.

Almost exactly two years ago a report published by none other than the government’s environment department concluded that flooding poses the greatest threat to the UK by climate change, with 3.6 million directly at risk by the middle of the century. At the time, an expert warned that without planning and investment to tackle the issue, the UK would “sleepwalk into disaster”.

The report said that in the next ten years or so there will be increased flood damage to homes with knock-on effects in insurance premiums and mental health. By the middle of the century there will be shortages in public water supply and water quality will be worse.

Shockingly, it identified the possibility of refugees because of dwindling water and food, surface water flooding will get worse, there will be changes in wildlife migration as animals and plants fail to move fast enough to thrive, sewer overflows will pollute the coast, soil will erode because of heavier rains, there will be changes in fish stocks… the list goes on.

What had the government done the year before this report came out? Imposed a year-on-year cut of more than 20 per cent in flood defence spending and left 1,144 schemes without government funding, including key projects in York, Thirsk and Leeds.

Now, a caught-on-the-back-foot government has said money is no object in the current relief effort and so far has offered a £5,000 improvement grant for hit homeowners, three-months’ business rate relief for affected businesses, £10m to farmers, £130m flood defence maintenance bill, £7m for a flood recovery package and £31m for rail resilience projects, plus £344m for 55 “new” flood defences - or is that just re-instating a paltry 4.8 per cent of the schemes that were dumped in 2011?

Too little, too late? That sleepwalk into disaster clock is ticking. Very, very loudly.