It comes as the Environment Secretary spoke at the Downing Street daily press briefing on Sunday to announce that 29,058 tests were carried out on Saturday.

The military is being brought in to operate mobile testing units to try and double capacity in four days.

The units will be run in care homes, police stations, fire stations, benefits offices and prisons.

The Department for Health and Social Care said that the mobile units will test essential workers and vulnerable people in high demand areas.

The military will be brought into the fold for testing on Friday.

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The news follows major demand for testing across the country, after available tests have fallen well short of Health Secretary Matt Hancock’s target of 100,000 a day.

More than ten million key workers and their households are eligible for swab tests that determine if they have the virus.

However, the online booking system for tests at drive-through sites in England crashed within minutes of going live on Friday and on Saturday morning all spaces were booked within an hour.

Home-testing kits became unavailable less than 15 minutes after 16,000 bookings were made.

Key workers across the country have struggled to access testing that would allow them to work without fear of spreading the virus.

About 13,000 personnel, or nine per cent of the UK armed forces, are absent from regular duty because of the pandemic.

A BBC survey of care homes also found that no workers had been tested at nearly three quarters of homes.

The 210 care homes and providers surveyed employ nearly 18,000 staff and have almost 13,000 residents.

Of those, 159 said that none of their workers had been screened while 127 out of 205 homes said that none of their residents had been tested.

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Matt Hancock set the ambitious target for testing on 2 April.

He said: “I’m now setting the goal of 100,000 tests per day by the end of this month.

“That is the goal and I’m determined we’ll get there.”

Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, told The Andrew Marr Show on Sunday that the government was on track to meet its target of 100,000 tests and predicted that there would be a “surge” of tests in the coming days.

Rachel Reeves, the shadow Cabinet Office minister, said that the number of tests needed to be “ramped up” beyond 100,000 a day.

She said: “The prime minister spoke previously about 250,000 tests a day and certainly if we’re going to come out of the lockdown we know that we’re going to need mass testing at a community level.”

The UK’s total confirmed cases of coronavirus has reached 152,840.

In the last 24 hours, the country has 4,463 new cases.

Confirmed deaths in the country have hit 20,732, although concerns remain over their accuracy and whether they include care homes.

The figures were last updated on Monday morning, with 413 new deaths on Sunday.

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