On antibody testing, the Department of Health said a UK Rapid Test Consortium (UK-RTC) including Oxford University, Abingdon Health, BBI Solutions, Omega Diagnostics and CIGA Healthcare has launched "in order to design and develop a new antibody test" that is home-grown.

But Professor John Newton, the Government's head of coronavirus testing, admitted that the tests would now not be available until May at least after every sample sent to Public Health England was found to be unreliable. Last month, PHE suggested the fingerprick tests would be on shop shelves within days.

"Although the target as the Secretary of State set it was not specific to different types of test, we do not expect to be doing antibody tests by the end of April," Prof Newton said.

It came after The Telegraph spoke to experts who claimed a lack of blood samples from patients who have suffered Covid-19 was hampering efforts to validate antibody tests

Public Health England (PHE) currently only has a small number of positive blood samples for screening antibody tests to see whether they work, while the Department of Health is trying to create a blood bank.

Part of the issue, according to PHE, is that it takes time for an immune response to develop, and therefore blood from those who have suffered Covid-19 is only just reaching the maturity needed for use in antibody tests.

But some private labs said their efforts to validate tests that can then be used by frontline staff and the wider public are being hampered by PHE not sharing its samples.

Professor Karol Sikora, the founder of Rutherford Cancer Centres, said he and a colleague had tried to obtain samples from PHE to validate some tests from Korea which have the potential for widespread public use – but he added that there had been no response to numerous inquiries.

"I have got 1,000 kits arriving from Korea tomorrow," he said. "We want to test 50 of them in the lab, but the bottom line is none of us can do anything until we get samples from people who have recovered from coronavirus.

"But we've had no response from PHE, nobody appears to be in charge, they don't answer the phone, they don't answer emails. PHE are a very sleepy organisation, and they've never had to deal with anything like this before."

Prof Sikora said officials had also failed to communicate with companies on what the exact threshold is for a "good test". He also said he had no faith that the results would be accepted even if a good test was found. "There are lots of labs in a similar situation – maybe 50 or 100 around the country," he said.

Health Minister Lord Bethell said: "We are rapidly scaling up the national effort to boost testing capacity for coronavirus to protect the vulnerable, support our NHS and, ultimately, save lives.

"I am proud that we have already had an impressive response from companies of different scales and from different sectors coming forward with a commitment to work together, share expertise and resources to establish a large British diagnostics industry which can help us achieve 100,000 tests a day by the end of April."