Matt Hancock has said the government is doing “everything they can” to ensure Brits can enjoy a sumer holiday this year.

On Wednesday, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps warned it was still “too soon” for anybody to be booking summer holidays, sentiments echoed by the Prime Minister. 

Mr Shapps said that vaccinations will play a key part in allowing travel restrictions to be lifted, and warned that current rules will remain in place until the vaccine rollout reaches a level for travelling to be safe - both in the UK and internationally.

Speaking on BBC Breakfast, he explained: “It depends on the level of vaccination here and, critically, elsewhere.

“We’ve done 13 million-plus vaccinations, which is just more than the whole of the EU put together.

“So we’ll need to wait for other countries to catch up as well in order to be able to do that wider international block, because we can only control the situation here.”

Despite Mr Shapps’ warning, Health Secretary Matt Hancock has already booked his summer holiday in Cornwall this year.

Speaking to Sky News on Thursday morning, Mr Hancock said people want certainty over whether it was possible to go away this summer, either in the UK or abroad.

"What we have all been saying is we will do everything we can to make sure that people can have a holiday but these are uncertain times," he told Sky News.

"That is something people understand - especially after the last year, people really get that.

"The fact that we have all been talking in exactly the same terms that there is uncertainty, but we want to bring an end to that uncertainty."

England’s deputy chief medical officer Jonathan Van-Tam said it was “plausible” for other countries to require people to be vaccinated against Covid-19 before they travel.

He told the BBC: “I can’t tell you how other countries are going to react to us, react to the idea of international travel in the post-Covid pandemic world, and whether in fact other countries will themselves insist that visitors are vaccinated, I don’t know the answer to that. And I don’t think other countries yet know the answer to that.”

He added that it was “certainly plausible that people will start to frame things that way” because of concerns about the spread of coronavirus variants.