Substantial work still needs to be done to protect houses from flood damage and to ensure homes do not dangerously overheat in summer as climate change intensifies storms and heatwaves in the UK. That is the key message from one of the country’s leading experts on climate change adaptation.

Speaking on the eve of the Climate Adaptation Summit, which opens tomorrow in the Netherlands, Julia King told the Observer that although some improvements had been made to Britain’s preparations for dealing with global heating, some important protection was still lacking.

“We have to do more to make houses more resilient to flood waters and we also have to deal with the issue of properties becoming worryingly overheated in summer,” said King, who is a member of the UK Committee on Climate Change (CCC). “These issues need to be addressed as key priorities as global warming continues.”

“Not enough has been done to ensure people get help in dealing with this sort of thing,” King added. “The impact on mental health of having your home flooded is directly related to the extent of the damage caused, and the time it takes to repair it. So this needs to be addressed directly.”

I thought of Thorney, Somerset and Thorney, Westminster as twin towns of a kind, for one was subject to decisions made in the other – though by the time the winter was over, the inhabitants of the village and its neighbours would reverse the pattern, by forcing those at the centre to accept their perception of the causes of the flood.

There were other resentments directed at the other Thorney: people were tired of being told by Londoners that they shouldn’t live on flood plains, since London is on a flood plain as well. Yet even the Thames Barrier – which is deployed with increasing regularity to protect central London – cannot stop the Thames bursting its banks upstream, and the residents of places like Thorney were angry that nothing much was done until Berkshire and Surrey had flooded.

Most people recognised that living beside water carries risks – some did not regret their choice even after they had been flooded. Yet many saw floods as a man-made disaster, rather than a natural one, caused by the neglect or mismanagement of the office-bound bureaucrats who rarely visit the places they oversee.

More than 11,000 new homes are planned to be built on land at the highest risk of flooding in the regions battered by the worst winter storms in a generation, the Guardian has learned.

An analysis of planning documents reveals that 11,410 new homes have been planned for land the government considers high-risk in the seven English counties where thousands of properties have been devastated by flooding since November.

Leaders of councils across northern England have called for “massive” increases in funding to deal with major incidents, as the Guardian learned that around 1,800 homes and businesses have been badly flooded in the region.

Dozens of weather warnings remain in place around the country, from Oxfordshire to Yorkshire and across the West Midlands, where more than 100 schools were forced to close on Thursday.

The mayor of the Sheffield city region, Dan Jarvis, described the flood-stricken village of Fishlake, near Doncaster, as having “the feel of a disaster movie”.

As flood-affected families braced for further downpours, the leaders of six councils demanded immediate and long-term financial support to recover from the devastation.

The leaders of councils in Doncaster, Rotherham, Sheffield, Barnsley, Bassetlaw and Kirklees warned of “considerable and lasting damage on a wide scale”, including to power plants and transport infrastructure, and called for funding increases to help them cope with future floods.

In the absence of detailed official figures, the Guardian contacted local authorities in all flood-affected areas and found that at least 1,758 properties had been flooded across Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire.

The figure is more than double the official Environment Agency estimate of 830 properties flooded.

More people are being evacuated from their homes in Derbyshire amid fears a damaged dam could collapse as further bad weather is forecast.

Fifty-five homes in the Horwich End area of Whaley Bridge were being cleared on Saturday evening, two days after some 1,500 residents were evacuated.

Water levels at the Toddbrook Reservoir in Whaley Bridge have been reduced by 1.3 metres since Thursday, but the condition of the structure remains “critical”.

Police said the additional evacuations were undertaken because of “a potential increase in risk of adverse weather in coming days and the ongoing risk of the Toddbrook Reservoir breaching”.

Derbyshire police allowed one person from each of the 400 Whaley Bridge properties evacuated on Thursday to return for a 15-minute visit on Saturday to pick up pets and other essentials.

At the Horwich End traffic lights on the Buxton side of the town, cars queued to get through the police blockade. Officers have stopped people entering the steep-sided village since Thursday afternoon when a month-and-a-half’s rain fell on the Derbyshire hills in just 48 hours, causing massive damage to the 180-year-old dam at Toddbrook reservoir.

This week Defra has launched a “call for evidence” to provide a new assessment of the damage that extreme rainfall could cause across England. Submitted evidence should focus on the impacts on populated areas including urban areas and crucial elements of infrastructure such as significant roads, bridges, energy infrastructure, water treatment plants, telecoms and hospitals. The Review team wants to understand the possible implications of extreme events and to review our current modelling assumptions. Defra is looking for people/organisations to submit evidence that has either been published in a peer-reviewed journal or evidence that has been published elsewhere following an independent review process. The deadline is 4 March and more details can be found here: https://consult.defra.gov.uk/water-and-flood-risk-management/national-flood-resilience-review-call-for-evidence The Review is due to be published this summer – more details here: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/national-flood-resilience-review-government-action-to-tackle-floods

England’s ability to sustain current levels of flood protection for homes and businesses faces “major risks”, MPs have warned.

Some five million properties across the country, or around one in six, are at risk of flooding from coastal, river and surface water, and climate change is increasing the risks of extreme weather and floods, a report by the public accounts committee said.

While the budget for spending on new defences has been agreed for the next six years, allowing longer term planning, funding for maintenance is only settled annually.

Slashed flood defence budgets have left the nation at the mercy of the wilder weather that climate change is bringing, according to the outgoing chair of the Environment Agency.

Lord Chris Smith, who steps down in July after a sometimes stormy six-year stint, said reduced funds and rising risks were an “inconvenient truth” and that failing to improve flood protection in the face of more frequent and extreme events was a false economy.

In an interview with the Guardian, he also said:

• the environment secretary, Owen Paterson, does not accept that global warming is due to the carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel burning;

• the government has failed to fulfil David Cameron’s pledge to be the “greenest ever”;

• the current resources available to regulate fracking safely could not cope with the government’s hoped-for shale gas boom;

• major budget cuts at the Environment Agency (EA) have cut action against the illegal dumping of waste.

For the first time in its history, the Environment Agency has assessed the state of all of its flood defences in England following the winter’s storms.

One thousand sites were identified as in need of repair, with the unprecedented series of storms causing £135m worth of damage.

Agency staff and members of the armed forces took six weeks to inspect more than 150,000 sites across the country.

To date, 350 defences have been repaired, the Agency said.

Over the winter, a series of powerful storms swept across the UK, resulting in coastal areas being battered by high waves and storm surges.

The Met Office said it was England’s wettest winter on record, leaving saturated river systems struggling to cope with the deluge.

“We closed the Thames Barrier 50 times between December and the middle of March,” explained Environment Agency director of strategy and investment Pete Fox.

“That is a quarter of all the times the barrier has been closed since it came into operation in 1983. That gives you a sense of how unprecedented the winter was.

Jeanette Shipp has lived in her home in Fetcham, Surrey, for 28 years, and has been fully insured there throughout – or so she thought.

But when she recently claimed for flood damage her insurer turned her down, effectively making her current plight worse, and causing her to worry that she will never get cover again.

Her property has a very long garden leading to a railway embankment which divides hers and neighbours’ land from the River Mole, outside Leatherhead in Surrey.

In her time living there the water has never come anywhere near her house. But in the late December spate of flooding the waters poured through culverts in the railway embankment and rose sufficiently to cover her ground floor to a depth of over a foot.

Initially her insurer – the UK division of Spanish company Ocaso – swung into action, promising to meet Jeanette’s hotel costs and to send contractors to deal with various aspects of the damage. But within a fortnight it changed its mind. Her house would not be covered, the loss adjuster said, because it was within 200m of a river. The implication was that it was her fault for not making clear the precise distance between the home and the river. The river itself is not visible from Jeanette’s or her neighbours’ properties.