More than 20,000 attempts are made each day to access child pornography through the internet, according to new figures from British Telecom.

The findings are the first evidence of the extent to which paedophiles in Britain are using the net to view hardcore sexual images of children.

BT customers represent roughly 25 per cent of the internet market, suggesting that the true level of attempts to view child porn online in Britain could be as high as 80,000 a day.

Paul Goggins, the Home Office Minister, said today that the figures were deeply shocking.

"Every image of a child that appears on the internet is an image of a child that is abused," Mr Goggins told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

The figures have emerged three weeks after BT installed new software called Cleanfeed, which it is using to block access by BT broadband and narrow band customers to hundreds of websites that contain illegal paedophile material.

The sites that BT blocked were those identified by the Internet Watch Foundation, a watchdog which tries to minimise the availability of illegal porn.

BT found that in the first three weeks of Cleanfeed's operation, it had blocked nearly 250,000 attempts to view web pages containing child pornography.

BT has 40 per cent of the broadband market, representing just over 1 million customers, and 21 per cent of the narrowband market, or 1.7 million customers.

Today the Internet Watch Foundation described the figures as staggering.

In the whole of 2003, the IWF received 16,000 complaints from internet users who had come across what they thought was child porn.

One third of these turned out to be sites showing potentially illegal material.

Pierre Danon, the chief executive of BT Retail, said that it was impossible to tell how many of the internet users had come across the porn sites by accident, and how many were paedophiles.

"We don't know their motives or who does it, and honestly we don't want to know," said Mr Danon.

BT does not identify or track those logging onto the sites, nor does it pass information on to the police.

Mr Danon promised that BT would make the blocking technology available free to other internet service providers so they too could block access to the sites.

It is illegal to view images of child porn under the 1978 Child Protection Act.

Stuart Hyde, the spokesman on combating child abuse on the internet for the Association of Chief Police Officers, praised Cleanfeed for preventing paedophiles from gaining access to child porn.

"Cleanfeed will make it much more difficult for people to access such images," said Mr Hyde, who is the Assistant Chief Constable of West Midlands Police.

Mr Hyde told Times Online: "Before, we could guess at the level of internet use of paedophile sites from the sheer scale of stuff that goes through internet chatrooms and e-mail. Cleanfeed gives us an electronic counting method, though we have to be clear that 20,000 hits a day does not equate to 20,000 paedophiles."

The police do not have the resources to investigate 250,000 attempts to enter illegal websites, Mr Hyde warned. He appealed for the Government to earmark some of the £23 billion it earned from 3G phone licences to funding to expand the fight against internet crime.

About 50 per cent of all paedophile websites are hosted in the US, and between 30 and 40 per cent in Russia and Eastern Europe. Very few are based in Britain, as the UK leads the world in the fight against online child pornography.

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