It has now been established that some of the gatherings in Downing Street during the pandemic lockdowns were unlawful. The Metropolitan Police has asked the Criminal Records Office to issue 20 fixed penalty notices (FPNs) to officials and others who breached the Covid-19 regulations that many of them were presumably responsible for drafting.

These are the first FPNs to be issued and more may follow as the Met continues an investigation that began six weeks ago. The force said there was a “significant amount of investigative material” still to be assessed, but does it really take this long to carry out such a straightforward task?

The police have also taken it upon themselves to keep the identities of those fined a secret. This is justified by reference to the College of Policing Approved Professional Practice for Media Relations. This states that the “identities of people dealt with by cautions, speeding fines and other fixed penalties – out-of-court disposals – should not be released or confirmed. Forces should say that ‘a man’ or ‘a woman’ has been dealt with and only release general details of the offence.”

There seems to be no statutory basis for this edict, and the College of Policing accepts that some public interest considerations apply as we report today. Moreover, the individuals receiving FPNs have accepted culpability for wrong-doing. They are, we assume, public servants who continue to work at the highest level of government helping to promulgate the law of the land. There is a public interest in knowing who they are and it is not for the police to decide who should and should not be named.

In a recent ruling seeking to balance the countervailing rights to privacy and free speech under the European Convention, the Supreme Court said the principle of privacy applied “prior to charge”. After that “the open justice principle generally means that the information is of an essentially public nature so that there can be no reasonable expectation of privacy in relation to it”.

Why, then, have the police decided otherwise? Can the Met point to the statute that covers its refusal to release the information? It is not for senior figures at Scotland Yard to make up the law as they go along. No 10 accepted that the Prime Minister would be identified were he to be fined but no one else would be. So if Boris Johnson is not handed a FPN we may never know who has been. This is not good enough.