For years the government has provided assurances that Huawei, the Chinese telecoms equipment maker, posed no risk to Britain’s national security by having supplied big chunks of the kit used in the country’s phone and broadband networks. But last week something changed.

An official watchdog that monitors Huawei’s UK products, and is overseen by the government’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), said in a report it could provide only “l(fā)imited assurance” that all risks to national security from the company’s involvement in British telecoms networks had been “sufficiently mitigated”.

The report revealed growing concern over “shortcomings” in Huawei’s engineering processes that exposed UK networks to “new risks”. If not resolved, the infrastructure could be vulnerable to cyber attacks, it indicated.