The government is hoping to find a "middle ground" over the use of encrypted messages, a senior civil servant has said.

Sarah Connelly, the government’s director for security and online harms, told a House of Lords committee on Tuesday that the government supported the availability of encrypted messaging services.

However, the government is hoping to meet with technology firms to find a way to carry on identifying abusive content.

"The idea is that we wouldn’t require eyes on on the content but we would require user complaints," she said of encrypted messages sent through WhatsApp.

It is hoping to use a "wraparound of other measures" such as user reports to technology companies to learn where abusive messages are sent without reading the messages themselves.

Last year, two senior employees of spy agency GCHQ suggested a system which would allow the government to silently monitor messages sent by terrorists by adding intelligence agencies as silent recipients to messages. This method would avoid forcing companies to break encryption, the proposal claimed.

However, technology giants including Apple, Microsoft and Facebook rejected the suggestion in an open letter published in May.

GCHQ's suggestion would require the technology firms to "mislead" their users, the open letter said. "GCHQ’s ghost proposal completely undermines this trust relationship and the authentication process," the technology businesses claimed.