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.

The chancellor has announced £750m of extra funding for frontline charities across the UK, a move that is unlikely to go far enough to save some third sector organisations from collapse.

The announcement, made by Rishi Sunak in Downing Street’s daily coronavirus briefing, came after widespread calls to extend government financial help offered to small- and medium-sized businesses to the charity sector.

Some of the best-known national charities are in dire straits as revenue from charity shops and fundraising events dries up during the coronavirus lockdown. The Labour MP Stephen Doughty tweeted that the new funding fell well short of what was needed, pointing out that the cancellation of the London marathon alone cost the sector £66m.

The Treasury said on Wednesday that £360m would be directly allocated by government departments to charities providing key services and supporting vulnerable people during the Covid-19 crisis.

Another £370m for small- and medium-sized charities would be available for community organisations that are providing services such as delivering food, essential medicines and providing financial advice. Of this, £60m will be allocated through the Barnett formula to those in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

The government will also match donations made to the National Emergencies Trust as part of the BBC’s Big Night In fundraiser later this month, pledging a minimum of £20m.

Bus route closures have left nearly a million Britons at risk of being cut off from basic services, research has found.

A study by the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) found that 56 per cent of small towns in the southwest and northeast of England were “transport deserts” or on the verge of becoming one, with residents unable to get around without driving.

Buses are the most popular form of public transport and account for more journeys than all other types combined. However, almost £400 million of local and national government funding has been cut, causing hundreds of services to be reduced in frequency or scrapped, and leading to fare increases of 63 per cent in real terms.

Nearly half of bus routes in England could be scrapped due to a lack of funding, councils have claimed.

Analysis for the Local Government Association (LGA) found that the free bus pass scheme was underfunded by an estimated £652 million in 2017/18.

Councils say they are being forced to fill the gap between this government funding and what the scheme costs.

Free bus passes for off-peak travel are a legal entitlement for people aged over 65, or those with a disability.

But budgetary constraints mean councils are spending less on discretionary items such as free peak travel, post-school transport and supported rural services.

Nearly half of all bus routes in England receive partial or complete subsidies from councils.

The LGA warned that these services are at risk as local authorities will struggle to maintain current levels of support unless they are given more funding.

It wants the Government to reinstate the full funding of the costs of the national concessionary travel scheme.

Professor John Appleby, the Nuffield Trust’s chief economist and director of research, said:  “The evidence is mounting that small and remote hospitals face higher costs that they cannot avoid, with comparatively poor performance against key NHS measures and dire financial positions.

“It is certainly worrying that the methods used to allocate funding to these hospitals are inconsistent, obscure and depend so heavily on judgment. We recommend that the true scale of costs is examined again, and that national bodies are much clearer about how they make their funding decisions.”

Jan Sobieraj, chief executive of the National Centre for Rural Health and Care, said: “This report is showing us that there is growing evidence that rural healthcare is not properly funded.”

“The choice that trusts in these areas have is to either have a deficit, or find themselves in danger of not having enough resources to cover the service.”

The report said efforts to adjust funding to recognise unavoidable differences in the cost of land, buildings and labour have been in place since the early 1980’s but tended to work to the advantage of urban areas.

And it said attempts to give small uplifts to some remote areas had been allocated in an “arbitrary manner” leaving some with nothing extra.

Ministers have been accused of a “stitch-up” over proposals to redraw the funding formula for councils in a way critics say will redirect scarce cash from deprived inner cities to affluent Conservative-voting shires.

The proposed changes – which include the recommendation that grant allocations should no longer be weighted to reflect the higher costs of poverty and deprivation – come amid increasing concern over the sustainability of local authority finances.

Leaders of urban councils have written to ministers to complain that under the “grossly unfair and illogical” proposals, potentially tens of millions of pounds would be switched to rural and suburban council areas.

Labour-run areas suffer Tory cuts the most. It’s an ignored national scandal.

Cllr Richard Watts, the leader of Islington council in London and chair of Labour’s local government resources group, said: “The evidence used by the government to justify these changes seems so bizarrely selective that it’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that the review is a brutal political stitch-up aimed at sparing Tory councils and Tory voters from more cuts while piling misery on the most deprived areas of the country.”

Northern cities and metropolitan councils see the so-called fair funding review of local government revenue grant funding as an attempt by ministers to prop up financially struggling authorities and declining services in Tory heartlands. An estimated 76% of Conservative MPs represent constituencies covered by county councils.

The financial collapse of Northamptonshire county council a year ago – and well-publicised difficulties faced by other Tory-run counties such as Somerset and East Sussex – have focused attention on the impact of austerity cuts to local services such as libraries, parks and Sure Start centres in even relatively affluent areas.

Details of the proposed changes were contained in a consultation released by the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government just before Christmas. The ministry has insisted the review is a technical exercise designed to simplify grant distribution among English councils and will make the process more transparent.

The number of NHS and local government bodies with significant financial weaknesses in their ability to give value for money is unacceptably high and increasing, according to Whitehall’s spending watchdog.

The National Audit Office has examined the financial statements from nearly 937 local health authorities, councils, police and local fire bodies which are responsible for about £154bn of net revenue spending every year.

Auditors conclude in a report published on Wednesday that the number of local bodies with significant weaknesses increased from 170 (18%) in 2015-16 to 208 (22%) in 2017-18.

It follows the publication of an International Monetary Fund report in October which found that the UK’s public finances were among the weakest in the world after the 2008 financial crash.

Sir Amyas Morse, the head of the NAO, said he was shocked by the persistent high level of qualified audit reports at local public bodies.

“A qualification is a judgment that something is seriously wrong, but despite these continued warnings, the number of bodies receiving qualifications is trending upwards,” he said.

“Let us hear no cries of: ‘Where were the auditors?’ when things go wrong. The answer will be: ‘They did the job, but you weren’t listening.’

“This is not good enough. Local bodies need to address their weaknesses, and departments across government should ensure they are challenging local bodies to demonstrate how they are responding.”

A coffee caravan in rural Suffolk, furniture restoration projects for men and organised rambles for the recently bereaved are among more than a hundred initiatives being backed with a £11.5m fund to tackle the epidemic of loneliness.

One hundred and twenty-six projects have been chosen to receive up to £100,000 each in the first ever government-backed fund to tackle a problem that the prime minister, Theresa May, described as “incredibly damaging to our humanity” when she launched a national loneliness strategy in October.

The projects will target a wide range of groups across England from isolated Pakistani women in Bradford to young LGBTQ+ in Bristol and lonely elderly men in Cornwall.

The government believes the health impact of loneliness is on a par with obesity and smoking. It says loneliness is associated with a greater risk of smoking, coronary heart disease and stroke as well as an increased risk of depression, low self-esteem, sleep problems and Alzheimer’s disease.