Environment secretary George Eustice said he would be holidaying in Cornwall this year.
He told Sky News: “Our advice has been don’t travel unless it’s absolutely necessary.
“Obviously we had hoped, with these three categories that we had, we had hoped that situation would be improving in other parts of the world, that we’d be able to progressively add other countries to the green list.
“Sadly, that’s not the situation, we do have this new variant of concern first identified in India that is now cropping up in other countries, and we’ve just got to take a very cautious approach.”
He added: “I will be staying at home, I have no intention of travelling or going on a holiday abroad this summer.”
He added: "I think, my advice to people would be holiday at home."
Mr Eustice said the “critical test” ahead of the planned lifting of restrictions on June 21 will be whether those who are vaccinated are being infected.
He told Sky News: “What we’re not seeing at the moment is that growth in hospitalisations associated with (infections) and that’s because we know that if people have the vaccine, particularly once they’ve had the second jab of the vaccine, it actually does give them immunity to this new strain that’s around.”
Mr Eustice said the borders were not closed to India earlier when infections there were rising because the country had better testing in place.
He told Sky News: “Initially, the incidence of the virus in people arriving from India was lower and, overall, while they were reporting high numbers of cases, that’s because they were doing more testing.
“We were also looking at factors such as their ability to do genome sequencing and we’re looking at all of this where we assess other countries.”
He denied the decision not to close the borders to India sooner had been a political decision.
He said: “India was added as soon as we saw a spike in rates and as soon as we saw there was a reason to.”
