Filey people, who have been swamped twice in five years by sewage from overflowing drains during heavy rain, are furious that Scarborough Council is to spend £226,000 on another paper exercise on flooding hotspots in the town.

However, council chiefs underlined yesterday that the problem in Filey was being attacked on a number of fronts by many different agencies and the authority's success in obtaining funding from the Environment Agency for the new study was another step in the right direction.

Three hundred people were flooded out on the Scarborough Road Trees Estate in Filey in August 2002. Then the 2007 floods hit 294 homes, leading to an award of more than £43,000 from the British Red Cross, plus a further £16,000 in the pipeline.

It had now been agreed by Filey Flood Working Group the Red Cross cash should be spent on measures such as door and air brick covers to help reduce the risks to 80 properties.

However, a Scarborough Council report states progress on flood defences will depend on a further study for which the council has obtained the £226,000 from the EA.

But residents say simple measures such as ditch-digging and putting in larger pipes to drain large areas of farmland which contributed to the flash foods could be achieved much more speedily at not much cost.

Floods campaigner Robert Dyson said spending the Red Cross money on tinkering with houses was "just rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic" until proper flood defences were put in. He said: "It is absolutely ridiculous and beyond belief.

"It has been years since the first big flood and we have not stuck a spade in the ground yet. We thought after one consultants' report we would get the work done, not go from one report to another."

Resident Gordon Johnson said: "The first consultants' study cost £140,000 and it was never implemented – and that was around 2004. That could possibly have prevented the 2007 flooding.

"Now another £226,000 is going to consultants. We are told this is required because there has been additional house-building work done. But that's immaterial because they are proposing to build another 300 houses at the top of Muston Road.

"The consultants will take a year and then it will have to be approved by the Scarborough Council and the EA. So you are looking at 2011 before you have any prevention activity taking place."

The Flood Working Group was established before the first flood and had achieved nothing, he said, adding: "We still have people in Filey who have not got back into their premises and that was over a year ago."

Scarborough's Head of Technical Services John Riby said one of the major investigations now required is a study to identify the Flood Defence Options available for Filey and to test their feasibility and cost benefit.

This would normally be more than the town hall could afford but because flooding was now a multi-agency problem and Scarborough was responsible for the local drains it had been able to call on the EA to fund the work.

This had been approved in June and it would enable the benefits to be measured, opening the door to further funding.