Concern is mounting about the use of private companies in national security efforts in the wake of a row over Chinese company Huawei’s possible involvement in the UK’s future 5G network.

Fears have been raised over how best to harness the terror-fighting potential of technologies such as Google’s data analysis tools while also protecting highly sensitive information.

One senior member of the intelligence community told The Daily Telegraph the discussion around Huawei should be provoking a wider debate about “just how we can effectively declassify key information [in order to share it with companies safely] when we’ve too much of it to examine in the first place”.

“Whose hands will it end up in?” they added.

The problem of outsourcing analysis of counter-terror data was raised by MPs on the intelligence and security committee last November, as part of their examination of lessons learnt from the 2017 spate of terror attacks.