What To Do About Flooding

It seems that since Christmas, the UK has been visited weekly by one storm or another sweeping in off the Atlantic on a rapidly swirling Jet Stream.
The result has been catastrophic floods along the South Coast with the Western edge of the country hit again and again.
As this weekend saw even more torrential rain and 80mph winds adding to the woes of the inhabitants of Devon and Somerset, we seem to be facing a crunch question of how we are going to deal with this. Two hundred years of recklessly filling our skies with pollutants has bought us to where we are today and climate change, with its resulting rising sea levels and extreme weather events mean that the invasion by sea on our island nation is inevitable.
After months of battering, the flood defences are being overwhelmed and coastal erosion as we have seen in Somerset is happening now.
As floods are expected to increase as warmer temperatures lead to more moisture in the air and more frequent severe downpours, erosion is inescapable and we have a choice of either 'forcing the sea back to keep it out' as one Government minister has said or adapt to our new situation which could mean a painful choice for people living on the coasts currently being hammered by the angry elements.
The government's current approach is to spend £130 million patching up the defences, or keeping the sea out, a course of action that the  National Trust's coast and marine adviser, Phil Dyke, described as 'applying a sticking plasters on things that will pull off again and again'. 
That's the dilemma, do we continually spends hundreds of millions each year on a problem that is not only going to happen again and again but get worse as time goes on, or take a more radical approach and let the sea in and move the people.
With the UK already facing a shortage of places to build new cities, it isn't an easy option but with annual flooding and uninsurable housing in the West, it may happen naturally anyway as people flee the flood stricken areas.