Children exploited by gangs operating “county lines” drugs rings have been failed by police and agencies unable to operate effectively across regional boundaries, according to a new report.

Officers were not easily able to share intelligence with other forces or even between teams in the same force while local authorities were often unaware of vulnerable children within their areas, the report, commissioned by the Home Office, said.

An understanding of the scale and nature of the problem was variable across and within different areas and organisations, leading to young people being inappropriately criminalised, it said.

One head of children’s services was quoted as saying: “In our county, we have three unitary authorities, two youth offending services, two clinical commissioning partnerships, two public health bodies, one police force, three adult safeguarding teams and three multi-agency safeguarding hubs. Each authority has a different youth offer and its own child sexual exploitation lead.

“The county is so diverse. We’ve got a lot of gang activity in two towns and then rural middle England. Getting the right people around the table can be challenging.”

“County lines” gangs use children to traffic drugs from the inner city areas where they are based to provincial towns, where they are used to sell drugs. They have long presented a challenge to police, who are used to working within specific force areas and who are unable to target the organised criminals higher up the chain who are directing the actions of the children.

The report was published by the St Giles Trust, which works with young people caught up in offending, after sections were leaked to the press at the weekend. The charity ran a pilot project between September 2017 and March 2018 working with young people involved in lines extending from London to Kent.

Case workers had expected to find most of the young people involved had travelled from London to sell drugs. Instead, they found that 85% of the young people involved were locals.

St Giles’s work was judged a success, but a report into the nature and scale of the problem found that police and other agencies in some areas – including schools and social services - were yet to develop effective measures to tackle the problem.

Often when children are arrested away from their home area, local agencies that were already stretched were unwilling to take on the responsibility for dealing with them. “This can lead to children being in a no-man’s land with agencies in both areas unable or unwilling to facilitate the child’s return [home],” the report said. “Many children seem to go missing again as soon as they are returned to home/care.”

A Home Office spokesperson said the government was determined to crack down on “county lines” gangs and pointed to the opening of a national centre to investigate the problem as evidence of moves to strengthen the response.

“Schools, colleges and pupil referral units all have a legal duty to safeguard children and we have begun an externally led review on exclusions to explore why some groups of children are more likely to be excluded than others,” the spokesperson said.

“We are also reforming alternative provision to make sure that children who aren’t in mainstream schools receive a high-quality education which allows them to succeed and fulfil their potential.”