Merkel made the comment as she held a joint press conference with British prime minister Boris Johnson at Chequers on Friday (2 July) during her visit to the UK.

Currently all UK residents visiting Germany are required to quarantine for 14 days even if they have received both vaccine doses due to fears about the spread of the Delta variant of Covid.

“We are reviewing continuously our travel restrictions and we think that in the foreseeable future those who have received double jabs will then, according to our classification - and now Britain obviously is a high incidence area - will be able to travel again without having to go into quarantine,” said Merkel.

Johnson added that “progress” had been made on the issue of entry restrictions for UK visitors to Germany during the leaders’ discussions.

Merkel’s comments are being interpreted as a “change of tone” after she last week pushed for the EU to implement tighter restrictions on UK arrivals across all 27 member states. But this was met with resistance from several southern European countries including Spain.