At the daily Downing Street press conference, Environment Secretary George Eustice called for furloughed workers to take a second job picking fruit or harvesting crops, when he spoke at Tuesday's Downing Street press conference.

He said: "Every year large numbers of people come from countries such as Romania or Bulgaria to take part in the harvest, harvesting crops such as strawberries and salads and vegetable," he said.

"We estimate that probably only about a third of the people that would normally come are already here, and small numbers may continue to travel.

"But one thing is clear and that is that this year we will need to rely on British workers to lend a hand to help bring that harvest home."

Mr Eustice said that furloughed workers "may be getting to the point that they want to lend a hand and play their part, they may be wanting to get out and they may be wanting to supplement their income".

Giving the latest figures, he said said 35,341 people had died in hospitals, care homes and the wider community after testing positive for coronavirus in the UK as of 5pm on Monday, up by 545 from 34,796 the day before.

In the 24-hour period up to 9am on Tuesday, 89,784 tests were carried out or dispatched, with a total of 2,412 positive results.

Overall a total of 2,772,552 tests have been carried out, and 248,818 cases have been confirmed positive.

Professor Dame Angela McLean, deputy chief scientific adviser, said there was a "sustained decline across all four of our nations" in the numbers of Covid-19 hospital patients requiring mechanical ventilation - a marker of those who have been worst affected after contracting the virus.

Talking viewers through the presentation slides at the daily Downing Street briefing, Dame Angela also said there was a continued "steady decline" in the number of coronavirus-associated deaths demonstrated in the published data.

She said the UK will try to emulate South Korea's successful contact tracing system.

Kuljit, a member of the public from Solihull in the West Midlands, asked what lessons the UK has learnt from overseas.

Dame Angela said: "It's a very good point that we need to look to our near neighbours and also countries further away to learn what works and how long it takes to see if something is working or not working.

"The two I would draw particular lessons from would be South Korea, where I feel they've made inspiring use of all kinds of different contact tracing in order to control infection to an extent that they are now down to a handful of new cases every day, and when they say new cases they mean people they have found in the community because of their contact tracing efforts.

"I think that is an experience that we are aiming to emulate.

"The other country I would look to is Germany, where the importance of testing has always been so clear and that is a place from where we have learned that we need to grow our testing facility, and have grown our testing facility."

Asked if he regretted that the Government stopped tracing in the community in March, Mr Eustice said that testing and tracing capacity is being "ramped up".

He said: "The point that I would make on the testing and tracing is we've been expanding, ramping up that testing capacity over the last couple of months.

"We got it to 100,000 capacity by the end of April, we're continuing to build that. This week, Matt Hancock has made clear that anybody over the age of five with symptoms can get a test."

Mr Eustice denied that the Government has a political motivation for calling for some school years to return next month and said ministers were following the science and the lead of other European neighbours.

He said: "We do believe it is important that initially we get the year ones and Year sixs back into a school environment to help prepare them for the move up to secondary school, in the case of the latter, and to also help settle in the younger children in the former.

"We do believe that other countries, like Denmark, have demonstrated how it is possible in fact to bring schools back into opening, albeit in a socially distanced way, albeit with fewer pupils initially and staggering the times that year groups arrive and so on.

"Other countries have demonstrated ways that this can be done. I think it is important we learn from those other countries and that's exactly what we are trying to do."

Following a question from the media, the Cabinet minister said he did "not accept" that the Government had "put the science to one side" in order to call for schools to return from June 1.

Mr Eustice said schools returning formed a part of the country attempting to live with coronavirus.

"It is absolutely the case that all of us are going to have to live alongside this virus for some time to come and we do need to try to live our lives and identify ways of returning to work as far as possible and put into place those social distancing measures," he said.

"That's what's happened from day one in supermarkets, as people will have seen.

"That is what has happened from day one in the NHS, which has obviously been dealing with people affected by the virus, and it is the case, as other walks of life get back to something close to normality, we do have to identify ways of doing that while observing the social distancing."