Covid restrictions could mostly be gone by May, ministers reportedly hope but Jeremy Hunt has urged for caution.
Lockdown-sceptic Tories are pushing for the measures to be lifted entirely by June.
Yesterday, Mark Harper, the Chair of the Covid Recovery Group (CRG) group called on ministers to lift all coronavirus restrictions in just three months.
The backbench Tory MP said he thought the Government could "get rid of restrictions completely" by the end of May.
And a Whitehall source was reported to have said that ministers also hoped they could ease most coronavirus restrictions in line with that timetable because of the efforts of the vaccination programme.
The Daily Mail reports that a source said: "If the vaccine programme goes the way we think it will go, then you will start to see quite a quick return to normal in April and May."
However Jeremy Hunt, the former Health Secretary and current chair of the health select committee has called on ministers to take a more cautious approach to lifting lockdown.
In an interview with the Guardian, he said the government should aim to suppress Covid enough to allow a 'South Korean-style approach' of intensive contact tracing .
This would reportedly involve some restrictions staying in place for an extended period of time.
He told the paper: “I think we have to recognise that the game has changed massively over Christmas with these new variants.
"And that we mustn’t make the mistake that we made last year of thinking that we’re not going to have another resurgence of the virus."
He is reported to have said that cases should be first brought down to '1,000 new infections a day or less.'
It comes after Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty said that while the UK was probably past the peak of infections, they remain "incredibly high" - and could rise quickly - plunging the NHS "back into trouble extraordinarily fast."
He said that the number of people in hospital is still higher than in the first peak in April last year and went on to warn that the number of deaths would "stay high for quite some time."
A further 1,322 people died within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19 as of Wednesday, the Government said, while there were another 19,202 lab-confirmed cases of coronavirus in the UK.
