The country needs a Covid fines amnesty, believes the man who oversaw the courts during the pandemic.

With three years having now passed since most legal lockdown restrictions were lifted, former justice secretary Sir Robert Buckland says the 29,383 people fined for Covid rule breaches should have ‘their slates wiped clean’.

Ministry of Justice figures reveal fines totalling £26m were given to almost 30,000 people - with the largest share handed to people in their 30s.

Given how young many offenders were - Buckland argues - barring them now from jobs within education, the police or social work because of their convictions isn’t fair, particularly at a time when the government needs people in work.

We all have go-to lockdown stories to tell.

Its left a legacy that will live long in our memories - sitting alongside recollections of terrible first days at school, failed exams, tales involving grizzly broken bones and ghastly trips to A&E or a brutal childbirth story.

But alongside missed birthdays, cancelled weddings or babies introduced to grandparents through double-glazed windows were people who endured gut-wrenchingly, terrible, life-changing experiences as a result of those stringent rules.

And it wouldn’t be right to push aside their suffering and the price people paid for sticking to the letter of the law, to clear the records of those that didn’t.

For as long as the Covid inquiry is ongoing - with public hearings listed until summer next year - it’s not right to talk about erasing parts of that history we now view as unpalatable or an inconvenience.

In the months and years since those long lockdown days - and with the benefit of hindsight as science has told us more about a virus which too has evolved - we’ve probably all taken a view about particular restrictions and questioned how we ever managed to find such obedience.

But the vast majority of the population took one for the team at the time and stuck to exactly what we were told to do.

We’ve probably also reached the conclusion thanks to the life-affirming wake-up call lockdown offered, that some aspects of life should remain sacrosanct and I doubt allowing people to die alone or having funerals with limited mourners would be rules to ever see the light of day again.

Nonetheless, it was a pandemic that claimed the lives of 227,000 people - many of whom would have suffered at the hands of those lockdown laws in one way or another. On top of that were those that lost their livelihoods, their businesses, in some cases the roof over their head as a result.

And it cannot be that we dismiss their experiences because others - who in many cases were old enough to know better - would now like a decent job and regret their choices.

Many of those who find themselves in front of our justice system regret choosing the path that took them there but it can’t be a recognised excuse for rubbing out the consequences of someone’s actions.

Also of course - among those thousands of penalties were more than 120 fines for lockdown breaches in Downing Street.

And I for one don’t want to see any precedent set that might risk government rule breakers - including Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson - being let off the hook.