East Sussex County Council has hit out at the Environment Agency's report into the floods that struck many parts of the county last October.

The council says the Agency was wrong to blame bridges over the River Ouse in central Lewes for the scale of the floods.

East Sussex County Council said it did not accept the watchdog's claim that the Cliffe Bridge and Phoenix Causeway were factors that contributed to the disaster.

A report to go before the council's ruling Cabinet tomorrow demands the agency "correct any impression" the two bridges aggravated the flooding.

And it accuses the watchdog of being too slow in drawing-up plans to improve flood defences to prevent a repeat of the disaster.

The report says the narrowing of the river would have restricted the flow of water even if Cliffe Bridge had not been there and Phoenix Causeway did not have a "major contributory effect" on the flooding.

On improving flood defences, it says: "One big issue is about the speed of action on new measures.

"The Environment Agency has so far not been clear about its ability to deliver modifications to the river regime."

Consultants called in by the agency said Cliffe Bridge and Phoenix Causeway acted as a bottleneck, causing water trapped upstream to top defences. The agency's Sussex area manager Peter Midgley said the channel in central Lewes was too narrow to contain the amount of water in the river when the flood happened.

He said: "It is that whole stretch of channel down there, what we were not trying to do was point the finger at those two bridges."

On the speed of the agency's response, he said: "What weare talking about is the biggest flood in the past 200 years, what we need to do is look very carefully at what we can do to increase the standard of defences.

"If we start knee-jerk reactions we will simply pass the problem on to somebody else."

The council's Cabinet will consider the report at its last meeting before the June 7 local elections.