Children play as a car floats in flood waters in Treeton near Sheffield, England. (AFP)

London, June 27 (Reuters): Monsoon summers, with short but heavy downpours, are predicted by scientists to become a feature of British weather, bringing floods that could cause around one billion pounds worth of extra damage a year.

The flash flooding that has affected Sheffield and Hull in particular this week, as well as a large swathe of land across the north of England and the Midlands, is a growing phenomenon and follows floods in Carlisle in 2005 and Boscastle in 2004. The Environment Agency expects the risks of flooding to rise significantly during this century.

Climate change is being blamed, as well as poor maintenance of the flood prevention system and dabbling in nature, such as concreting over the countryside which acts as a natural drainage system and trying to re-route rivers.

Lax planning permission has also resulted in half the new housing since World War II being built on flood-prone land.

Dr Kevin Hiscock, hydrologist at the University of East Anglia, said: “Climate change scenarios for the future indicate that rainfall intensity will increase: there will be fewer rain days but when it rains it will fall in larger volumes.

“Storm water drainage systems in our older cities may not be able to cope with increased rainfall intensities.”

Failure to tackle flooding could result in more misery for hundreds of thousands of homeowners.

Dr Dave Reay, of the School of GeoSciences at the University of Edinburgh, said:“The risk of flooding and climate change will put more and more homes at risk. If we fail to address climate change, by the year 2075 flooding could be costing us an extra one billion pounds a year.”

Richard Hey, at the University of Birmingham, said it was essential to return the function of natural rivers by recreating river meanders and reconnecting them with their flood plains.

A lack of money is also cited by experts as detrimental.