Drug-related deaths will not come down from record levels unless the government invests in treatment services, experts behind a pioneering project to save lives have said.

The most recent official figures show that 4,359 deaths from drug poisoning were recorded in England and Wales in 2018, the highest number since records began in 1993, with around two-thirds attributed to drug misuse.

Addaction, one of the UK’s biggest drug and alcohol charities, which provides treatment services across the country, is backing a pilot scheme in the north-east of England to bring to the streets a life-saving medication that reverses the effects of an overdose.

But Gary Besterfield, the service manager of Addaction Redcar and Cleveland, who is supervising the pilot scheme with George Charlton, an independent consultant, has issued a stark warning to the government about the desperate state of funding for drug treatment.

“I would absolutely say one of the contributing factors [to the rise in deaths] is the drop in funding. The current political climate is not supportive of the work we do,” Besterfied said. “With Brexit issues and everything that’s gone on, we’re just in the back seat. If I’m brutally honest, drug-related deaths to the government at the minute, I don’t think it’s a priority.”

Studies have shown that councils have responded to central government cuts by cutting spending on drug treatment services by about 27% on average since 2015–16, and in some areas by more than 50%.

The Conservative party’s 2019 manifesto briefly mentioned introducing “a new approach to treatment so we can reduce drug deaths” but little further.

Besterfield said: “Our purse strings are being cut more and more. My budget has been decimated, I need more and more staff. Our money is going down, drug deaths are going up.”

He said naloxone cost £18 per kit and came out of his budget. Under the pilot, a team of peers – people with lived experience of drug issues – take naloxone on to the streets, approaching people who use opioids. The team will give out the drug and train people in how to use it. The main life-threatening effect of an opioid overdose is to slow down or stop breathing. Naloxone blocks this effect and reverses breathing difficulties.

“Projects like these you want to support,” Besterfield said. “There’s loads of these innovative ideas we could do but it comes down to money as well.”

He called on Boris Johnson to “take a gamble” and look at decriminalisation, to which he believes the public are becoming increasingly open.

Charlton, a drug-user activist with lived experience of drugs, said the criminalisation of drugs was behind drug deaths and the burden placed on overstretched services.

He said: “It’s still grounded in the Misuse of Drugs Act. That was 1971. It hasn’t been reviewed since. We know we’re criminalising and prosecuting people for taking drugs that are less harmful than alcohol. That’s unjust.”

Charlton called for more support for innovative work at a local level, such as the peer-to-peer naloxone project but also drug testing in city centres and the introduction of drug consumption rooms.

He said: “It takes people at a local level to say: ‘The government can have its view up there; however, this is our patch, let’s keep our people alive.’ When we start joining up locally, there are powers that exist to bring about some real change.

“We need the government to recognise [that it should] take some sensible steps in terms of decriminalisation, regulation and legalisation and get into a place where we can have drug markets where we can make some good money out of that and reinvest.”

A government spokesperson said: “The number of drug deaths across the UK is extremely concerning, and every death is a tragedy.

“We are committed to ensuring everyone has access to the right health services and we continue to support a range of evidence-based approaches to reduce the health-related harms of drug misuse. These will be reviewed at an upcoming government summit to tackle drug-related deaths in the UK.”