Police chiefs ordered binmen to act as spies by sifting through rubbish to look for pamphlets produced by Islamic terror groups.

Town halls responsible for areas with large Muslim populations were summoned to London and told to get their refuse collectors to search bins for discarded documents or material that might identify and incriminate Islamic extremists.

The Mail on Sunday understands that the instruction was issued at a secretive summit hosted by the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), attended by Ministers and Andy Hayman, who at the time was Britain's top anti-terror policeman and an Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.

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The meeting was designed to encourage the chief executives of 17 local authorities – including Manchester, Oldham, Leicester, Bradford and four London boroughs – to get their employees to play a greater role in addressing extremism and the terror threat.

They were told that the meeting, held at the Victoria Park Plaza Hotel in Central London, and its deliberations were to remain strictly confidential.

But the bin-searching instruction was deemed so potentially damaging to community relations that councils simply refused to carry out any sort of spying.

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