Partygate: ‘Special treatment’ accusations as Met Police refuses to give details of 20 fines over Covid breaches

The Metropolitan Police is refusing to give details of the 20 fines issued as part of its investigation into Downing Street and Cabinet Office parties.

Questions were mounting over why the force appears to be giving less information than it put concerning ordinary members of the public accused of breaking Covid laws at events throughout the pandemic.

There have been allegations of “special treatment” for the politicians and civil servants involved, whose conduct has been subject to more thorough investigation than around 120,000 people previously given on-the-spot fines in England and Wales.

A statement from Scotland Yard said only that 20 fixed penalty notices were to be issued for breaches of Covid-19 regulations as part of its “Operation Hillman” probe.

It added that official guidance prohibits naming of individuals given fixed penalty notices, and that a breakdown of events “may lead to their identification”.

The force has refused to confirm the number of people given the 20 fixed penalty notices, the amount of the fines - which ranged from £100 to £10,000 - and which of the varying Covid laws in place during the period were used.

But Scotland Yard has given those details in previous press releases concerning the enforcement of lockdowns and other coronavirus restrictions.

Dates, times, road names and the names of businesses and venues were all made public by the force.

An October 2020 press release named a venue in Southwark where police had been called to an illegal wedding, saying its owner could be fined £10,000 and condemning “a dangerous and foolish breach of the regulations”.

The following month, a restaurant was identified in a statement concerning a wedding reception, and the force detailed road names in numerous releases over house parties, raves and other large gatherings that were illegal at the time.

It has routinely published the number of people fined, and the amount of money involved, for specific events - such as in an announcement that nine Metropolitan Police officers had been fined £200 each for meeting at a Greenwich café in January 2021.

Kirsty Brimelow QC, a human rights barrister, said the absence of equivalent information on the Partygate fines was creating speculation over which of the 12 events under investigation were found to be illegal.

“The 12 gatherings were publicly identified in a published report by Sue Gray,” she told The Independent.

“Fairness secures legitimacy of the law. The difficulty with the current police approach is that the details are so broad that there is no transparency as to which gatherings were potentially criminal, and the size of the fixed penalty notice considered appropriate under the relevant regulations.

“This after all is in the context of members of the public having been issued fixed penalty notices of £10,000.”

The Fair Trials campaign group said the announcement “calls into question the legitimacy of the coronavirus enforcement regime”.

Legal officer Griff Ferris added: “During the pandemic hundreds of thousands of ordinary people were fined under coronavirus laws.

“Many of these fines were unjust or unlawful, and often issued in a discriminatory way. None of those people were afforded special treatment, such as being allowed to make their case to the police in the form of questionnaires. Most had their cases heard behind closed doors and they were publicly named and shamed.

“We hope that those in power will now see for themselves the need for a full-scale amnesty and refunds for all those affected by the coronavirus restrictions.”

According to the latest figures from the National Police Chiefs’ Council, almost 119,000 fixed penalty notices for breaching the Health Protection Regulations have so far been processed by police in England and Wales.

Of those, 70,500 were paid within 28 days, 2,700 fines were contested and 51,353 fines remain unpaid and may result in prosecution.

The Metropolitan Police has not given a reason for the withholding of information on the number or amount of Partygate fines in response to questions by The Independent.

A spokesperson said: “The MPS is not providing a breakdown [of events] as the regulations changed regularly through the Covid period and providing a breakdown at this point may lead to identification of the event and therefore the individuals.

“We are not discussing the number of individuals to whom FPNs will be issued.”