Health sec 'not ruling out' foreign holidays this summer

Holmes’s fellow presenter Ruth Langsford said the two-week quarantine on return requirement was putting people off getting on planes to Spain, Portugal and Greece, and asked Hancock if it was something the government was "maybe having second thoughts about".

"We’re going to bring it [quarantine] in on 8 June," said Hancock. "We’ll keep that under review so in the same way there is a three-weekly review of the overall lockdown measures. But it is important, and especially now that the number of new infections is much lower than it was at the peak, it means those coming from abroad are a bigger proportion of the overall infections so the quarantine rules are important."

Holmes though pushed Hancock further on holidays, asking whether it was now "not out of the question for people to hope and have their fingers crossed about a July foreign holiday?".

"I absolutely wouldn’t rule it out," said Hancock. "But we’ve got to proceed cautiously. We’ve seen what happens when this virus gets out of control. We’ll proceed cautiously and carefully, but I definitely wouldn’t say no, and I know how important it [a holiday] is for so many people."