TORY austerity is forcing women into danger, campaigners warned yesterday as the government plans more cuts to vital refuges across Britain.

Refuge managers and campaign group Women’s Lives Matter warned that domestic abuse victims will die as they are turned away from refuges with no room for those fleeing violence.

Yet the government has slashed funding by a quarter over the last seven years despite police reporting that the number of domestic violence cases has increased by a third over the same period.

The government announced last year a £20 million pot for domestic violence projects but, with funding seriously lagging behind, 50 local authorities received nothing. The refuges were forced to submit bids for funding in order to survive.

And all-party parliamentary group on domestic violence chairwoman Jess Phillips poured scorn on government claims it was investing “tens of millions” into domestic violence services saying it was “not being felt on the ground.”

Refuge managers are reportedly having to put their entire workforce on notice of redundancy as they desperately wait for winning funding bids to be confirmed.

Statistics from 84 local authorities revealed that more than 1,000 vulnerable women and children were turned away from refuges across England in the last six months.

Clare Phillipson, manager of a refuge in Sunderland, said: “I spent last weekend trying to work out which woman to turn away.

“You’re thinking: ‘Is this woman going to die if we turn them away?’ It’s awful.”

An average of two women are killed a week in England and Wales as a result of domestic violence.

Yet funding for women’s refuges has been slashed from £31.2m when the Tories came into power in 2010 — or £36.7m when adjusted for inflation — to just £23.9m in 2016 and 2017.

Wealthy Kensington and Chelsea Council has cut spending by a staggering 45 per cent since 2010, with a ceiling of a refuge in the borough collapsing a month after the Grenfell Tower disaster.

And a woman from the West Midlands was told that the nearest free space in a refuge was in Orkney off the coast of Scotland.

Last month, campaigners stormed a Doncaster Council meeting in protest against the proposed closure of South Yorkshire Women’s Aid centre — the only resource of its kind in the country.

The centre, which has provided a range of support services for women for the last 40 years — asked that the council uses its reserves of £91m and a £1m underspend from a grant to keep it running.

However the council refused and it now looks set to close.

A government spokesman claimed it was taking action to make sure no victim of domestic abuse is being turned away and that it was going to provide £40m funding for services up until 2020.