Headline writers have been thumbing their copies of Roget's Thesaurus over the weekend for words relating to “deluge” and “tempest”. But what they should have written, was “homes flooded on slightly damp day, thanks to foolishly designed housing estates”.

My first reaction on seeing the pictures of people knee-deep in their living rooms was: what incredible rainfall there must have been. But when I looked up the figures, I was shocked by how little rain fell over the country on Friday and Saturday. The wettest place in Britain, Liscombe, Devon, received 2.04ins in 24 hours - a trickle compared with the 7ins that fell on Worcestershire in a few hours in June 2007.

It was poor Mrs Pritchard, of Lydney, Gloucestershire, who gave the game away as she mopped up her home, flooded for the third time in 15 months. She had never had a problem in 23 years, she said, until a new housing estate was built nearby.

It is silly enough building on floodplains - I've lost count of the number of developers' hoardings I've seen in fields where a few months before ducks had been swimming.

But equally foolish is the covering so much land with concrete and tarmac - which prevents water soaking into the ground and allows it to run off. Houses used to have decent-sized gardens, with grass and exposed soil to mop up large quantities of rainwater. Now even expensive houses are packed close together and what open ground remains is taken up with hard standing for a couple of BMWs plus a large patio for the barbecue.

If you don't believe what a difference this makes to drainage you should see the controlled experiment that I performed in my own garden. The path outside my back door used to flood to a depth of 3ins. Since I took half the patio up it has flooded to a maximum of 1in and when the other half comes up I expect never to be flooded again.

Multiply my patio by the number of houses on a new estate and what have you got - overwhelmed drains and a raging flood born out of a heavy shower. Yet flooding is easy to avoid. Every house by law should be required to have a large underground tank to collect rainwater, which can be used to flush the loo. Roads, car parks and patios should be built from porous asphalt. Bizarrely, I need permission from the local authority every time I prune a tree or change a window frame - yet I could concrete over my garden, and flood the neighbourhood without asking anyone.

You may be wondering when the weather will relent long enough to use your barbecue. But when it comes to flooding I'm afraid your barbie is part of the problem.

Times Recommends

• Farwell to the stiff upper lip
• It’s about who runs the US, not health
• The Iron Lady and her blue felt-tip sympathy