It comes as the body responsible for protecting England from river flooding releases its review of its own performance in the summer's floods, when almost 300 schools in the Yorkshire and the Humber region were damaged.

In a series of hard-hitting recommendations the Agency calls for Ministers to bring in new legislation to force owners of critical infrastructure to protect their assets from future flooding.

It also joins a cacophony of calls for Ministers to increase flood defence funding.

While the current £600m a year will rise to £800m by 2010-11, the Agency, like the Association of British Insurers, believes that figure should be closer to £1bn.

And the Agency believes it should be given responsibility for handling surface water flooding – currently split between water companies and local authorities – along with new legislation to force companies such as Yorkshire Water to pay for new sewerage systems.

The report uses three Yorkshire cities to illustrate what the agency could do better with more power.

In Hull, giving the Environment Agency more control would improve the planning, funding and management of flooding – allowing the city's antiquated sewerage system to be overhauled.

In Leeds, the agency will lobby the Government for more funding to get a long-shelved £80m flood defence scheme built as soon as possible.

In Sheffield, the agency would use strengthened powers to veto building on flood plains. It cites a 2006 planning application to convert an office block into a nursery, an application it objected to and which was subsequently rejected.

"During the floods the building was flooded and cut off by waters up to 1.5m deep. If the nursery proposal had gone ahead the effects could have been much more catastrophic," the report states.

On its part the Agency will improve training of key staff to give them more authority in emergency command centres; make efforts to improve its flood prediction system; and redouble efforts to get people in flood risk areas to sign up to its free early warning telephone service.

Even after the publicity from this summer's floods only 41 per cent of people nationally are signed up to the system and only 17 per cent in Sheffield.

Last night Mark Tinnion, Yorkshire flood defence manager, said: "If there was another flood on a similar scale to last summer's I anticipate things would be better. We're having refresher training – that means that duty officers in command centres will be better prepared and equipped.

"We've been tweaking our flood defence plans so that local authorities can better defend themselves, our (river] flood warning system is getting better, and I like to hope the uptake of our telephone warning system will improve.

"But many of our aims are longer term. It will take years rather than months to be able to predict surface water flooding with any degree of accuracy, and increased funding for flood defences will not happen overnight."

Key structures vulnerable

Infrastructure in England and Wales at 'significant risk' of flooding:

• Hospitals 13


• Care homes 227


• Schools 414


• Doctors' surgeries 680


• Railway stations 222


• Ambulance stations 46


• Fire stations 86


• Police stations 99


• Power stations 2,215


• Telephone exchanges 82


• Sewage plants 739


• Miles of rail track 914