Up to £5m has been allocated by the Home Office to support victims of county lines exploitation over the next three years.

Hundreds of victims will be helped to escape drug gangs following the expansion of support services in London, the West Midlands, Merseyside and Greater Manchester.

These are the largest exporting areas for county lines activity, which involves drug trafficking operations in which children or vulnerable adults are groomed to run drugs from one city to other parts of the country.

The money will go towards providing a rescue service and specialist one-to-one support for victims.

Up to £5m has been allocated by the Home Office to support victims of county lines exploitation over the next three years.

Hundreds of victims will be helped to escape drug gangs following the expansion of support services in London, the West Midlands, Merseyside and Greater Manchester.

These are the largest exporting areas for county lines activity, which involves drug trafficking operations in which children or vulnerable adults are groomed to run drugs from one city to other parts of the country.

The money will go towards providing a rescue service and specialist one-to-one support for victims.

Police in Lincolnshire are turning to technology to assist in the fight against rural crime.

Twenty hi-tech cameras, complete with night vision, will be installed at secret locations in remote areas of the county and can alert police to intruders within seconds. It comes after an investment from the police and crime commissioner, Marc Jones.

“It is imperative that we make use of the latest technology in our fight to keep our communities safe,” he said.

Lincolnshire Police is already using drones in a bid to reduce rural crime, including hare coursing. Mr Jones has agreed to support the new Rural Spotter project, which will be evaluated at six and 12 months, with a £20,000 investment funded by money seized from criminals. He said the cameras would “seriously enhance” the police’s ability to “put eyes on the most isolated locations”.

“It is just the latest investment in providing the right tools for our officers to provide them the best opportunity to protect residents, homes, businesses and property,” he added.

A new rural crime task force was formed in 2021 to combat criminal activity, including hare coursing, lead theft and theft from farms and rural properties.

Lincolnshire Police has also recently invested in other new high-tech kit, including night vision googles and drones.

Ch Insp Phil Vickers, lead for rural crime, said using new technology was crucial.

“Lincolnshire is a huge area to cover and the quicker we are alerted to crime the better chance we have of catching the offenders,” he said.

Organised crime may be having an increasing impact on rural communities, according to police.

A new project will assess the effects of a rise in rural crime on farmers and their families in Devon and Cornwall.

Farmers have been asked to complete an online survey about their experiences of crime in what organisers claim is the first study of its kind.

The police are working with academics to deliver the survey and look at possible solutions.

PC Martin Beck, rural affairs officer with Devon and Cornwall Police, said: “This project aims to use our rural communities to help map the nature of the crime, and analyse the impact of crime and fear of crime, on farming.

“It will also help us examine ways to evaluate and improve farm security.”

A 2020 Rural Crime Report by NFU Mutual found there had been a 14% rise in rural crime in the South West.

The project is being led by the University of Plymouth, in collaboration with Devon and Cornwall Police and the University of Winchester.

The survey asks if farmers feel safe on their farms, and whether they feel crime is a problem in their community, but also how those feelings have changed in recent years.

The nature of crimes farmers are experiencing, and how they differ from past incidents, will also be explored in the survey.

Nearly 1,500 people have been arrested in England and Wales in a week-long operation against so-called county lines drug dealing networks.

Police say they have started focusing on senior figures controlling phone numbers used to sell drugs.

Officers are also using modern slavery and human trafficking laws to prosecute gangs exploiting vulnerable children.

Some 139 county lines were closed, and almost £2m of Class A drugs, including cocaine and heroin, seized.

County line gangs are urban drug dealers who sell to customers in more rural areas via dedicated phone lines.

They have become central to the trade in illegal substances across Britain and the way they operate is often accompanied by serious violence. 

Gangs in cities operate phone lines advertised in other towns and rural areas to supply drugs, while remaining at arm’s length to reduce the risk of arrest.

A lack of funding for rural youth work in England is leaving young people exposed to the dangers of county lines drug-dealing gangs, it is claimed.

The amount spent per head on youth work for 11- to 19-year-olds in rural England, £47, is 25% less than in urban areas, and half the level a decade ago.

The National Youth Agency said rural employment prospects and mental-health support access were also a concern.

The government said it had given youth-work charities £100m over the pandemic.

But the National Youth Agency is calling for it to implement a long-term spending plan.

‘Increasing trend’

County-lines gangs often use vulnerable children to help them bring illegal drugs into areas across the UK – and move money out.

The National Youth Agency said it had seen an “increasing trend” for young people in county towns and rural areas to be targeted.

Youth workers were vital in protecting those at risk by providing a known and trusted adult, chief executive Leigh Middleton told BBC News.

But, he added: “As local authority budgets have shrunk, [resources have] gone to our towns and cities.”

Police say new tactics have enabled them to drive the expansion of ‘county lines’ drug dealing into reverse, and have vowed to eradicate it from the country’s worst-affected area.

County lines – whereby drug-dealing gangs from cities expand their operations to other areas – had been growing every year, with rural areas such as Norfolk plagued by drugs from London and serious violence. Gangs had become so comfortable they were sending out “Happy Christmas” messages to their clients.

Under the tactics, escalated during the coronavirus lockdown, officers go after those controlling the lines from London via their pay-as-you-go mobile phones rather than just chasing the runners sent to rural areas.

In Norfolk, the runners are usually teenagers who transport drugs in clingfilm wraps within their body. Cash is taken back to London in the same way.

So far, 30 out of 75 lines in Norfolk have been shut after those controlling them were traced and arrested in London, police say, with the closed lines responsible for half the drugs sold. Det Insp Robin Windsor-Waite, the officer leading Norfolk police’s efforts, told the Guardian: “It is a massive rollback.”

Norfolk is the area in Britain with the highest number of recorded crimes linked to county lines, with hotspots in Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn, and police say they have rewritten the rule book on how to tackle it.

Windsor-Waite said: “As those controlling the networks are commonly based outside the county, they may have a feeling of impunity, believing they’re beyond our reach and being careful not to attract the attention of their home force. To successfully tackle county lines criminality, we need to arrest the controlling minds rather than the mules and street dealers.

“In the majority of cases, the arrest of the line controller terminates the line – and the risk associated with that line. Prior to this operation there was a degree of resignation to the continued exponential growth of county lines within Norfolk. The outlook has been transformed and our ambition is to completely eliminate the county lines business model from the county.”

The tactics have led to arrests being made in London since December. The Home Office provided extra money for the Met to act on intelligence.

Since November, 146 London-based alleged county line holders have been charged with selling class A drugs such as crack and heroin across Britain – in Scotland, Surrey, Kent, south Wales, and Devon and Cornwall, as well as Norfolk.

But cuts to youth services are just one factor that police, community workers and others cite for an often overlooked rise in knife crime outside London in counties such as Kent, which has experienced a rise of 152% since 2010, according to ONS figures.

They include the spillover of violence from so-called county lines – drug dealing that involves urban gangs moving drugs and cash between city hubs and provincial areas – as well as London councils’ relocation of homeless families to outside the capital, in some cases being followed by the dangers from which the parents have sought to shield their children.