Bus swept down river as northern England battles devastating flooding

The Scottish Environment Protection Agency has also issued seven flood alerts and 16 flood warnings while the UK’s Met Office issued a yellow warning of rain for parts of north Wales, northern England and southern Scotland.

People can donate to the Lancashire flood recovery fund appeal here; the Calderdale flood relief appeal here, and the Greater Manchester appeal here.

Around 500 properties were flooded in the city on Sunday.

Mr Cameron was heckled as he arrived in flood-hit areas of York where large swathes of the city are submerged and hundreds of homes have been evacuated.

The Government has vowed to look again at the quality of the UK’s flood defences as home and business owners face up to a miserable start to the new year.

Some 500 military troops have been mobilised to aid emergency services, with another 1,000 on standby should the situation worsen.

“You don’t just protect people of course through the flood defences, although they are important, and of course while some flood defences haven’t worked this time many flood defences have worked and protected thousands of homes”.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs also warned that persistent rainfall could also bring flooding to Herefordshire and Shropshire in areas near the River Wye and River Severn.

The Ouse is more than five yards above its normal summer levels and is predicted to keep rising until lunchtime today, when it is expected to reach 5.8 yards.

Flood warnings… A man wades through flood waters at Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire, England, Saturday Dec. 26, 2015.

Electricity North West warned power may not be restored to some homes until Monday. Erica Hammill, who runs Hotel 53 with her husband, Michael, in the Piccadilly area of the city, said hotel guests had to climb out of ground floor windows to escape the flooding.

Calling for an increase of flood defence investment, he said: “This is the worst we have ever seen”.

Lisa Pallister, 36, said she made a decision to leave her home in York with her family as the floodwaters rose.

“We are moving from known extremes to unknown extremes”, David Rooke, deputy chief executive of the Environment Agency, which handles the government’s flood response, told BBC radio. As well as communities in northern England, areas around the River Severn in Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin and Worcestershire are also at risk. We’re pretty clear it needs to be about the whole system.

British troops have been helping emergency workers and local residents in a widespread evacuation of towns and cities.

David Cameron has rejected claims that there is a “north/south divide” in United Kingdom efforts to prevent flooding during a visit to flood-ravaged York.

“Simple things like turning off your Christmas lights or not using your washing machine or dishwasher for a while would make a huge difference”.

Council leader Tim Swift said: “It’s just obvious that the scale of flooding events over the last 10 years has been dramatically greater than anything we’ve had before and without getting into an argument even if you put the most generous interpretation on what the Government is doing the level of flood resilience funding hasn’t increased to match that”.