A former spy boss believes young Mancunians affected by the Manchester Arena bomb will apply to join the new GCHQ centre in Manchester when it arrives next year.

Robert Hannigan, ex-director of the UK intelligence agency, which works closely with MI5 and MI6 to combat terrorism, said ‘keeping the city safe’ after last year's atrocity will be a big motivator for a generation of new recruits.

Speaking exclusively to the M.E.N during a visit to the city, Hannigan, said the ‘diverse and young workforce’, growing tech industry and ‘impressive’ universities offered an ‘untapped talent pool’ for the new Government Communications Headquarters base.

He said: “Counter terrorism is a massive part of GCHQ’s work and it’s apt to be able to come to a city that has suffered from it. It’s great that young people in Manchester will have an opportunity to be part of that.

“We don’t recruit on money, we cannot compete with the private sector, we recruit because people think this is worthwhile and interesting work, keeping people safe. It is bound to be very motivating because there has been this terrible attack in Manchester.”

(Image: GCHQ.)

A government review of counter-terrorism and intelligence services following the arena attack revealed that bomber Salman Abedi had been identified as a subject of interest but was not under active investigation when he detonated a suicide device at Manchester Arena on May 22, 2017.

Hannigan, who was director of GCHQ in the months before the blast, was asked about the scale of monitoring that Abedi received, but declined to comment.

Talking of the agency’s expansion into the North West he explained that it had been on the cards for several years, including during his tenure as director between 2014-17.

“There is a diverse, young workforce here and we would be tapping into talent pools we haven’t reached elsewhere,” he said.

“We’ve always recruited up here, but people have had to come down to Cheltenham or London. The way the tech industry and the universities are developing is really impressive and the economy up here is booming.

(Image: Joel Goodman)

There are a lot of impressive companies big and small and the Northern Powerhouse was a big driver. For all those reasons it’s an obvious place to come.”

Hannigan could not comment on the exact location of the new listening post, but confirmed that it would recruit hundreds of software developers, cyber security experts and analysts who work on the ‘biggest’ threats such as terrorism, hostile states like Russia and cyber-security.

Hannigan said that as well as recruiting graduates and mid-career experts, the organisation is also ramping up its recruitment of school-leavers.

“We recruit people straight from school,” he said. “We did that in the 1970s and 80s, and it went out of fashion, so we are going back into it in a big way.

“We are already getting good apprentices from Manchester and we will in the future. We do summer schools in Scarborough and I can see that developing here as well.”

(Image: Manchester Evening News.)

The Manchester base would expand the Government Communications Headquarters’ network of UK sites.

The agency’s headquarters are in Cheltenham, with offices also situated in Cornwall and Scarborough, and last year the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), which is part of GCHQ, opened its new base near Victoria in London.

The work of GCHQ professionals is forever linked with the work of mathematicians - famously including Manchester University pioneer Alan Turing, who worked to decipher German codes during the Second World War at Bletchley Park.

After the war, the then Code and Cipher School changed its name officially to GCHQ and moved to Middlesex and later to Cheltenham.

During his time as director Hannigan strongly promoted technical skills and oversaw the biggest internal transformation of GCHQ since the end of the Cold War.

(Image: GCHQ.)

He is credited for opening up the once secretive world in the aftermath of mass surveillance claims from Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency employee turned whistleblower.

“We had gone from being the most secretive agency in Britain to being attacked on the front pages of the Guardian, quite unfairly, and there was no one speaking for GCHQ because no one knew anything about it,” Hannigan explained. “In the litigation that was taken by Snowden, in every case the court said what we did was entirely legal, but there were two exceptions where they said you should have said more about what you are doing. And they were right, so that’s what we set about doing.

“It wasn’t that there was a huge public trust issue - opinion polls suggest that the public trust GCHQ despite not knowing a lot about it - but we thought there was a really good story to tell.

"We had the Investigatory Powers Act going through parliament, that was really essential to the way we operate, particularly in the context of terrorism, and we thought we need to educate lawmakers and the public about what this means, what we are doing and why this is necessary.”