The charity that took the brunt of the fallout from the sexual abuse revelations about the late Sir Jimmy Savile has been awarded nearly £500,000 from the Big Lottery Fund to expand its telephone helpline service.

The National Association for People Abused in Childhood (Napac) has won £481,388 from the Reaching Communities programme.

Chief executive Peter Saunders said demand for Napac’s England-wide service “rocketed” after Savile’s prolific offending was exposed last October.

Before the revelations became public, Napac received around 1,000 calls per month to its telephone support line. During October and November this increased to 3,500 calls per month and has now stabilised at 1,500 to 2,000 each month.

The main Support Line is staffed 52 hours a week with out-of-hours calls answered by NSPCC staff who have been trained by Napac.  Clients are also referred to the charity by police, medical professionals and Samaritans.

Napac – whose patrons include Esther Rantzen, Antony Worrall Thompson, Sara Payne and Jerry Hall - had appealed to the Jimmy Savile Charitable Trust for funding after the ITV documentary exposing the late presenter’s abuse first aired. The programme advised viewers to contact Napac if they needed support.

But despite promising to discuss the appeal at its next trustees meeting, the Trust did not respond for months and then only to inform Napac that it would not be providing funding to it.

At the time, Saunders told civilsociety.co.uk at the time that he felt the Trust had a moral obligation to offer funds:

“It’s our donors who are effectively subsidising Jimmy Savile and his offending - and I think the Trust should have considered talking to us.”

But other sources said that the funds from the Jimmy Savile Charitable Trust were frozen, and it was unlikely that anything would be leftover once the estate was used to pay claims and legal fees.

Napac is one of 29 projects sharing over £8.8m from the latest round of BIG’s Reaching Communities funding.