John Whittingdale, minister for media and data, told Sky News: “We’ve said that we’ll be looking later in the week to make revisions to the green list and I hope that we can put more countries onto it.

“I hope it will be possible to increase that number, but that’s something which we will be looking at later in the week.”

Whittingdale was interviewed by Sky’s Kay Burley, who pointed out that Malta had one in 100,000 incidences of Covid, Italy 12 and France 24, but the UK had 93.7.

She asked: “What on earth is the justification for not having European countries on the green list?”

Whittingdale replied: “Well, that is just one of the measures you have to look at.” He said the UK was “way ahead” of other European countries in the number of people vaccinated and said figures “can change quite quickly”.

“We were sadly forced to put Portugal temporarily back onto the amber list because of the case rate there. These are expert decisions by the scientists, they make recommendations to government and it takes account of a range of factors.”

Whittingdale said it was possible “to have a great holiday in Britain”.