A record 105,000 websites showing children being sexually abused and tortured have been found and removed in the past year by UK investigators - with 40% involving children aged 10 or under.

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) revealed that 1,300 of the sites, each of which can have thousands of images, involved infants aged under 2 and babies including newborns being abused.

The total 105,047 webpages, nearly all of which are hosted overseas, represents a 34% increase on last year’s 78,589 that were closed down.

It is an eight-fold rise on 2013 and follows IWF’s use of advanced web-crawling technology since 2014 which enables it to proactively search the internet for child abuse images.

Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary, said: “The horrifying amount of online child sexual abuse material removed by the IWF shows the true scale of the vile threat we are facing. This is why I have made tackling it one of my personal missions.”