On Sky News, Robert Jenrick was pressed on why Britain was lagging behind its testing capacity.

Why is testing taking so long?

On Monday we tested 8,240 individuals. This weekend we tested over 900 NHS staff. So we have now begun to move away from testing solely those who are in critical care to testing NHS staff. But I appreciate for many people that feels like it is taking too long.

When will we be up to 10,000?

I hope it will happen either today or tomorrow. We now have capacity to test 12,750 people every day.

We were focusing the capacity that we had on people in critical conditions which was on medical advice because that was the best way to save peoples lives so that hospital staff could understand what the condition was of those people who were in critical care.

Because we now have more capacity, clearly not as much as we would like… we’re now able to begin to test NHS staff so we’ve lifted a procedure which focused solely on individuals in critical care.

When will we be up to 25,000 tests a day?

We said we would hope to be in that position by Mid-April, we think within days we will be able to go from our present capacity to 15,000. So that’s a significant increase but still not as far as we’d like it to be.

Mid-April is when we expect to be at 25,000. But we now do have enough tests to test not just those patients in critical care but to begin to test NHS staff.