British police identified the man responsible for Wednesday’s attack on the Houses of Parliament as a 52-year-old Briton with a police record as Theresa May, prime minister, told sombre MPs that the public would not be cowed by the threat of terrorism.

The Metropolitan Police said that Khalid Masood was born in Kent, south-east of London. Detectives believed that he was most recently living in Birmingham in the West Midlands. Police arrested eight people suspected of terror offences in a series of raids yesterday, seven of them in Birmingham.

Masood, shot dead during the attack in which he killed a policeman and two civilians, was “not the subject of any current investigations and there was no prior intelligence about his intent to mount a terrorist attack,” police said.