Speaking to MPs during an evidence session for the Defence Select  Committee, BT’s chief technology officer Howard Watson cautioned that the mobile networks would likely suffer outages if given less time than the current 2027 date for removal.

He said: “We will comply with the law, but we’ve been very clear that a 2023 date for complete removal would cause significant mobile network outages – 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G, and we think that is the wrong thing to do for the nation given the dependence that we’ve all found on our telecommunications networks through the time that we’ve been through in the last four or five months. 

“So to rush this, we think, carries significant risk of blackouts across the country.”

Although the Government announced that Huawei and other “high-risk vendors” would be permitted a limited role in the UK 5G rollout in January, albeit only for “non-core infrastructure”, it reversed that decision earlier this month following further restrictions placed on the Chinese firm by the US.

During the evidence session, Conservative MP Mark Francois suggested that backbench MPs could seek to amend the bill to bring forward the current cut-off date from 2027 to 2023 “whether the Government likes it or not”.

Some Tory MPs have previously called for Huawei equipment to be removed by 2024, or before the next general election, amid fears of a lobbying campaign by the firm to reverse the decision.

When Francois raised the fact that some critics believe the industry is “crying wolf” over the issue, Watson said his firm had provided clear evidence of how much disruption could be caused.

“What I would say to that is we provided the empirical evidence: number of sites, amount of time, amount of effort to close streets, bring in cranes, lift equipment to rooftops,” he said.

“We provided all of that in our evidence to the supply chain review on which that decision was based.”

Before the 2027 cut-off date was announced, executives from Vodafone and BT said it would take a minimum of five years to remove Huawei equipment from their networks, potentially two years faster than the current expectation.