An epidemic of drug gangs is responsible for a child protection crisis which is as serious a threat as terrorism, the Children’s Commissioner warned last night.

Anne Longfield also said the true number of children being enslaved as drug runners in towns across the country could be as high as 50,000.

Her stark assessment came just hours after a Mail investigation lifted the lid on the scale of the ‘county lines’ drug menace.

In Norfolk, police have made more than 700 arrests and held 126 children on suspicion of dealing drugs.

Yesterday Ms Longfield warned that no child was safe as she likened the crisis to the scandal of the child-sex grooming gangs operating in towns such as Rotherham.

The Children’s Commissioner warned last night that an epidemic of drug gangs is responsible for a child protection crisis. (Stock photo)

She added: ‘That issue was made a national priority, in fact it was made a national threat alongside terrorism and national security and I think this is just the same.

It needs to put on the same basis because it can be tackled, children can be protected and this can be prevented.

But at the moment there is no one with a clear responsibility to do that.’

Yesterday, as one former minister said a generation of youngsters was being ‘abandoned’, it emerged that:

*The Home Office has issued new guidance on county lines revealing that white British children aged 15 to 16 are most at risk of exploitation.

*The guidance also states: ‘County lines exploitation can affect any child or young person, male or female under the age of 18 years’.

Yesterday’s Mail told how police in Norfolk have fought a two year battle against the county lines gangs. (Stock photo)

*Downing Street said the gangs amounted to ‘vile exploitation’ of children

*The chair of children’s services in Norfolk said all parents needed to be on their guard - no matter what their background

Yesterday’s Mail told how police in Norfolk have fought a two year battle against the county lines gangs.

Last night Downing Street said ministers were determined to tackle the ‘vile exploitation’ of children by drugs gangs. (Stock photo)

These drug lords - often based in major cities - use a network of children to sell their heroin and crack cocaine on the streets of provincial English and Welsh towns and cities.

The ‘lines’ refers to highly lucrative telephone lines used to contact the dealers.

The Mail reveald how in Norfolk alone children were being taken from the care system in London, Lecistershire, Essex and Teesside and sent to Norfolk to sell the drugs.

Yesterday, in a major intervention, Mrs Longfield made a reference to the series of child grooming scandals that have blighted many towns and cities over the last two decades.

She told the Mail: ‘Just as child sexual exploitation was a child protection crisis that was once being overlooked, the grooming of children by gangs in county lines is a child protection crisis that needs attention at a national level to prevent children getting involved, to protect them and help them re-enter mainstream school and society.

‘At every level nationally and locally there needs to be a much greater focus on building the intelligence about identifying the children at risk.’

Mrs Longfield said she was now talking to middle class parents of children performing well at school who had been lured into drug networks after being recruited in school, after school clubs, football fields, and playgrounds.

‘I think this is an issue that’s much bigger than urban areas, it’s much bigger than children in care. It is something that should be a concern to every area of the country, she said.

‘I speak to the parents of children who are doing well in school but they fall in with the wrong crowd and there is also the children that will have problems going on at home.

‘They will be the ones walking home alone who won’t have others around them and they are the easy picks.

The parents don’t know where to go and it’s as if no one is there to help them and they literally feel like they are on their own and no one cares.’

The National Crime Agency estimates that there are more than 1,000 county lines selling class A drugs in Britain, who have now invaded every police force area.

According to charities working to protect the young drug pushers, as many as 30 or 50 children might be involved in a single county line.

‘I think we are talking tens of thousands of children who are involved in it rather than hundreds’, Mrs Longfield said.

She said the gangs had also recently changed their tactics and were increasingly recruiting local youngsters,

‘With 1,000 lines, you are then looking at 30,000-50,000 children involved which is obviously chilling. If we go back even a year ago we would have looked for county lines activity in urban areas and in some of the seaside towns.

‘But now what we have got is every police force, including places like Cumbria and Northumberland, reporting county lines activity and I think a lot of this change has been very fast.

‘One thing that seems to have changed over recent months is that where there were children from the ‘export’ urban areas being sent outside those areas to sell the drugs, now they will recruit local kids to sell themselves locally.

‘The idea is clearly you can get in more places at once, but also that those kids are going to know their local area, they will fit in the profile of the population.

That means that in every area of the country now you have got kids- particularly vulnerable kids- who are at risk of being recruited into county lines in some form.

‘It’s not just something you can sit back and think well that happens in Manchester or Birmingham or London, it literally now is something which sadly is part of the furniture of every police force in the country and that’s a change.

‘The aggressive model of this business development is astounding -any child could be at risk of coming into contact with county lines now.’

Evidence from parents, education experts and charities suggests that those aged between 10 and 12 are now the ‘typical recruitment ground’ for drug runners who can earn £500 a week.

Staff at one pupil referral unit in the North West estimated that half of their children were in a gang and some 30 per cent were estimated to be drug couriers.

In one instance a boy under the age of 16 was entrapped by a London drugs group who forced him to handle a gun that had been used in a murder so his fingerprints were left on the weapon.

The Commissioner added: ‘The methods that the gangs use to tie them in are vicious and extremely dangerous.

‘Very often part of the process will be that the gang will arrange for that child on their first run to be robbed by someone in the gang and that child will come back and probably get beaten up and told now you owe us for the price of the drugs and the phone.

‘If they break that debt bond and try to break away they are threaten with extreme violence, not just to them but also to their parents and their siblings.

‘The gang will say no one is bothering about you now, no one cares, you will never get a job because you have already committed crimes and you owe us money so this is the only route for you.

‘Of course we are talking about children as young as 12, 13, 14 here who will be absolutely scared to death about the situation they suddenly find themselves in.’

She said that many of the child slaves were not aggressive gangsters, but shy teenagers with low self-esteem.

‘The gang members that I often see are the children that are completely lacking in self-confidence, often quite meek, not physically imposing at all, very shy and very lacking in self-worth.

‘Boys in the main, who could not make eye contact with you and kept their hoods up. The notion is that gang members are all aggressive and imposing.

But the main group of children that are being targeted here they will be children that are very vulnerable, visibly vulnerable.

‘There are gang members that are being sent out to find them. They are looking for kids they might pick on at school or at the school gates- they have their eye out.’

Yesterday the chair of children’s services in Norfolk County Council - where teenagers as young as 12 have been arrested for drug dealing - revealed the council has launched a new £250,000 dedicated taskforce to protect children from county lines gangs

Councillor Penny Carpenter said: ‘All parents need to be alive to this and identify the signs themselves in children.

‘We are all working extremely hard but I think the parents have a role to play in this about understanding a child, knowing where that child is, about excessive phone use and perhaps them going missing, or if they are using drug language or for some apparent reason you haven’t given them the money but they are walking in with a new pair of trainers or new jacket.

'Parents need to be aware about their own child.

‘You can see what is going on in our towns and cities, the death and destruction caused by these activities and I think sometimes we all get blinded by it, we don’t take it on board because I hate to say it but it’s almost the norm.

'It can happen to any child. It could happen to your child.’

Norfolk MP and former health minister Norman Lamb said: ‘We need to confront this failure of the education system in excluding children, which leads directly to the criminal justice system.

They are abandoning their responsibility in pursuit of results. We need a change of culture because the awful truth is it’s not just criminal gangs that are abandoning these children, but the state too.

We’re letting a whole generation of children down.’

Last night Downing Street said ministers were determined to tackle the ‘vile exploitation’ of children by drugs gangs.

Asked about the government’s response to the growing problem, her official spokesman said: ‘The strategy includes a range of measures to tackle these county lines gangs, including £3.6 million for establishing a new county lines co-ordination centre.

The intention is to help police forces work together to clamp down on what is vile exploitation.’

Mrs Longfield said: ‘Parents who have children that they are trying desperately hard to protect feel like everyone turns their back on them and no one has responsibility.

‘That’s something that has to change very swiftly.’