Vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi said the Prime Minister would unveil data on the effect of coronavirus jabs on hospital admissions and deaths when announcing his road map to the easing of lockdown restrictions this evening.

"Suffice to say the evidence looks good," he told Sky News.

"The Oxford team demonstrated their own evidence of cutting transmission by two thirds.

"We wouldn't be in this place this morning to be able to say that we're going to reopen schools on March 8, and of course, as the school holidays begin on March 29, we will look at the rule of six and two families being (able) to see each other outdoors, if we're not confident that actually the vaccine programme is beginning to really bear fruit."

But Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, a statistician from the University of Cambridge, said it was "upsetting" that the government was yet to publish more data on the vaccine rollout.

Sir David, who is also a non-executive director of the UK Statistics Authority, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "As a statistician, the lack of detailed data by the vaccine rollout I find very upsetting.

"...We don't know about the numbers or the proportions by the priority groups - the group one to nine; we don't know the proportions by ethnicity; we don't know this broken down by region.

"I mean they do, somebody does, but we're not getting it.

"And I think that's a real shame as it was asked for a long time ago and so far nothing has happened."