Communities in the North East will benefit from a £2.4 million package of schemes to help to protect them against the risk of flooding.

The funding is raised from local authorities in the North East by the Northumbria Regional Flood Defence Committee, which agreed to a four per cent increase for 2011/12 at a meeting on Friday last week.

The Northumbria Local Levy is used to deliver a range of locally important work on flood response, climate change action and comprehensive approaches to flooding on rivers. Also included are projects that have great local importance to smaller communities.

Committee chairman Frank Major said the levy supported ways of funding innovative and creative approaches to tackling local problems.

“The levy fund will finance more than 30 schemes in the next financial year which will concentrate on small-scale engineering work, and involve local people at the core of its solutions. It is more important than ever that we are able to protect communities from flooding.

“Our local levy programme is driven by locally-identified need, and has proved to be a rapid and cost-effective process that is influenced by local opinion and has communities at the heart of everything that it does.”

Local levy project manager Peter Kerr said:

“This increase in funding is a fantastic endorsement of our work, and next year we have a range of schemes to help communities across the North East to reduce their risk of flooding.”

The schemes for 2011/12 include:

• Repairing and raising the floodwalls in an area along the Ouseburn in Newcastle;

• Building flood banks and walls to protect properties in some of the areas close to Lustrum Beck in Stockton-Upon-Tees;

• The continuation of flood work in Belford, Northumberland. In previous years levy money has paid for the creation of a series of “leaky ponds” to hold back flood water. The next stage is to carry out work to the channel so that flood water can be conveyed quickly through the town.

• The expansion of the successful Living Waterways project into Teesside. The project team works with communities to reduce flood risk and improve urban streams and their associated green spaces for people and wildlife.