While many communities are still recovering from the severe flooding experienced in the north of England and Scotland this winter, the scale of the clean-up reflects the threat posed by extreme weather.

With increasingly unpredictable storms, local authorities are under mounting pressure to do more to protect their communities from the impact of future flooding. But if the UK is to create more flood resilient towns, a rethink about flood risk management will be required.

Greater integration between local authorities, the Environment Agency, water companies, communities and private landowners will be key to better managing flood risk to people across entire catchments.

While every catchment is different, installing and maintaining large-scale flood defences are not always possible or appropriate, so a combination of soft and hard engineered methods will likely be needed. Increasingly, proactive community-wide strategies that help communities become more flood resilient together are being used as an alternative approach to building local flood resilience. And community engagement is key to their implementation.

Educating communities on what it means to live with the risk of flooding so they can better prepare for and recover from them should be an important consideration when implementing resilience strategies. Property Level Protection (PLP) schemes that limit flood damage to individual properties but on a community-wide scale can be effective in building resilience across whole communities.

Recognising that ad hoc PLP installation would be unlikely to provide the necessary scale of protection, Southend-on-Sea BC took a large-scale, community-wide approach. Flooding has hit hundreds of homes in Southend-on-Sea over the past few years and Environment Agency figures estimate that more than 1,000 properties in the area could still be at high risk of surface water flooding in the future.

The council’s emergency planning team identified the property owners who were entitled to apply for the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs’ (Defra’s) Repair and Renew Grant. This initiative gives up to £5,000 to individual homeowners and businesses across the UK to help make their property more flood resilient.

The council applied for this funding at a borough level, which not only saved individuals from going through the application process, but also meant as many homes as possible could benefit from the scheme.

The team undertook a major community engagement campaign to reach eligible residents and submit funding applications on their behalf. This proactive approach also helped reach vulnerable residents, such as the elderly, who may have been overwhelmed by the application process if left to apply for funding themselves. By engaging a single contractor, the council was also able to quickly survey hundreds of homes to assess and determine the most suitable protection measures for each property depending on the level of flood risk. Within five months, more than 150 properties across the borough had been fitted out with bespoke PLP measures. Installation on this scale would not have been possible without a community-wide, proactive strategy that covered the entire borough.

Securing funding for local resilience schemes can be a major hurdle in getting projects like the Southend-on-Sea scheme off the ground. But there are other opportunities in addition to the Repair and Renew Grant available for local authorities. Investigating potential routes such as a local levy or water company investment could be worthwhile.

As more and more communities across the UK learn to live with the threat of flooding, alternative ways to build local flood resilience could become increasingly important flood protection measures.

Liz Gent is associate director at AECOM