The UK has lost 134 million miles of bus routes over the past decade, analysis shows, as campaigners warn of "Beeching-style" cuts to services.

Bus routes are now so severely reduced that hundreds of thousands of people have become reliant on volunteer-run bus services to drive them to hospital appointments and go shopping, it has emerged.

A series of cuts to local spending on buses has led to Britain's network shrinking to levels last seen in the late 1980s, according to BBC analysis of Department for Transport data.

And fears are growing that the UK's bus provision could be reduced to the same degree as railways were in the Sixties, when thousands of miles of track were scrapped and hundreds of stations closed following a report by British Railways Board chairman Dr Richard Beeching.