Two councils will be given £36m to tackle coastal erosion.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said the cash would help those living by the coast “to prepare and plan”.

Some of the measures include replacing damaged buildings and access roads, as well as repurposing land into wildlife habitats or temporary car parks.

The cash will be split between East Riding of Yorkshire Council and North Norfolk District Council.

Defra hopes the money will be used to “help deliver and test innovative adaptation projects” such as replacing public or community owned buildings in at-risk areas with “removable, modular or other innovative buildings”.

The Environment Agency will run the scheme until March 2027.

“These two locations are already living with the challenges of coastal erosion and between them include 84% of the properties at risk of coastal erosion in England over the next 20 years,” a Defra spokesperson said.

Residents in a North Lincolnshire village have been left feeling a little disorientated after a road sign was erected welcoming people to Yorkshire.

The mysterious sign, which can be seen by motorists entering Sandtoft, appeared earlier this week.

One resident said it was about 150m (492ft) from the original Welcome to North Lincolnshire sign – on the same side of the road.

Some have suggested it is the work of contractors unfamiliar with the area.

The local authority, North Lincolnshire Council, said it was unaware of the sign, while the neighbouring authority, Doncaster Council, has yet to respond to a request for comment.

Posting in a local Facebook group, one resident said it appeared the sign had been put up on the wrong side of the road and facing the wrong way.

Focusing on Hambleton, Richmondshire, northern parts of Craven and Ryedale, the A1 in Harrogate, and the A171 Moor Road corridor near Whitby, the operation aimed to ensure criminals could not prey on the county’s rural communities undetected.

From the evening of Wednesday 30 September 2020, into the early hours of this morning, 43 officers from North Yorkshire Police’s Neighbourhood Policing Teams and Rural Taskforce joined 51 Rural Watch volunteers on patrol as part of Operation Checkpoint.

Eighty-five per cent of North Yorkshire is classed as very rural or super-sparse, with a population density five times below the national average – highlighting the importance of information about suspicious activity from members of the public who know their local areas.

Operation Checkpoint aims to ensure these rural communities are ‘no-go areas’ for criminals.

Overnight, officers in North Yorkshire checked more than 80 vehicles, and carried out police checks on more than 20 people to ensure everything was in order. Those deterred by the operation included a group of suspected poachers in the Castleton area.

North Yorkshire Police co-ordinated with colleagues in Cleveland, Durham, Cumbria, Lancashire and Northumbria to provide high-visibility crime-fighting coverage across the North of England.

Sergeant Stuart Grainger, of North Yorkshire Police’s Rural Taskforce, said: “All of us were policing the rural area, looking for cross-border thieves, fly-tippers, poachers, and drink drivers. We were supported by an excellent number of volunteer Rural Watch members, who worked into the early hours.”

The dire lack of affordable properties available to both buy and rent has been blamed for an exodus of young people from many villages and market towns across the country. 

In some of the most desirable districts to live in North Yorkshire, the average property costs nearly £400,000 while the weekly wage in the county is just over £530. 

The Yorkshire Post revealed on Saturday that housing experts had warned the Government that Yorkshire and the rest of northern England are being “frozen out” of vital home-building schemes because of funding criteria which favour London and the South East.

The Government has been warned it faces a “rural revolution” as council taxpayers in parts of Yorkshire face bills of up to three times more than some of London’s most exclusive boroughs.

North Yorkshire County Council’s deputy leader Gareth Dadd told colleagues “we are now at the tipping point of acceptability over council tax”, as the authority pushed forward council tax increases with a “heavy heart”.

But Coun Dadd said: “This evidence will be paramount with Government lobbying. We are now at a tipping point of acceptability over council tax. Some may say this is a bit of a rural revolution.”

The council’s cabinet meeting heard the Government had created an additional budgeting headache by proposing local authorities be banned from using general funds to subsidise shortfalls in school funding without Secretary of State approval. Without extra funding, cash for children with special educational needs and disabilities would face a £12m shortfall over the next four years.

But Coun Dadd said the root cause of North Yorkshire’s difficulties centred on an unfair formula being used by the Government to calculate how much funding councils should receive.

He told members: “It cannot be right, as efficient as we are, for an average band D property council tax in North Yorkshire to be £1,544 and for a band D property in an average inner London borough to be £1,157, with some Westminster, for example, being £433 or £754 if you count the Greater London Authority. This inequality has been prevailing for decades under governments of all political colours.”

You might think that Drew Barrymore would be more at home in the Hollywood Hills than on the Yorkshire Moors. Yet here she is, standing on the famous Cow and Calf Rocks outside the market town of Ilkley, rain lashing down from the sort of apocalyptic sky that God’s own county does so well.

Barrymore and co-star Toni Collette are in a pivotal scene in their new movie Miss You Already, which went on general release last week. It’s a heartbreaking yet uplifting story of friendship, love and loss – and thanks to a vital plot point in which Barrymore and Collette take a drunken taxi ride north to deliver some home truths to each other amid the startling West Yorkshire landscape and a flock of sheep, Miss You Already is being chalked up as another success for the White Rose county’s bid to become nothing less than the Hollywood of the UK.

Titter ye not. It’s true and it’s thanks to various factors, chief among them the double whammy of an aggressively proactive investment body in the shape of Screen Yorkshire and the designation of one of the region’s biggest conurbations, Bradford, as the first Unesco City of Film in 2009. (It beat Los Angeles, Venice and Cannes to the honour.)