It could only happen in this sad, over-regulated country.

The incident hit the headlines in all the newspapers last week when a man in Cumbria was fined £225 for over-filling his wheelie bin by four inches!

Council staff and councillors should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves for acting in this appallingly heavy-handed manner.

The person fined has a wife, three children and another child from another relationship who is in the home at weekends. A family of that size generates a huge volume of rubbish.

The council in question opted to collect household rubbish fortnightly and also has a recycling collection. For a large family, that poses problems.

This particular family, apparently, fills up the rubbish bin and also the recycling bin and is left with more than the rubbish bin can hold, so the lid is tilted open by about four inches.

That's 4in too much for the dustmen, it seems.

The sad lot took pictures of the bin and gave the family a £110 fixed penalty notice.

The man refused to pay and it went to court. The magistrates added a further £115 to the fixed penalty and the man now also has a criminal record.

That could count against him if he had to look for another job at any time.

What a sad affair this is – a real indictment of how things have gone in this crazy country.

Firstly, it's important that councils work in partnership with residents to encourage people to bin all their rubbish rather than fly-tip and recycle as much as they can.

Heavy-handed £110 fixed penalty notices go no way in achieving this.

Secondly, if a person persists in over-filling his bin so that there's a danger that rubbish could blow out in the street there should be a warning to him that if the street was trashed by his rubbish the council would apply for a magistrates' order requiring him to clean up the whole street of litter.

I am so much in favour of a punishment fitting the "crime". Fining someone hits the family. Making a person make restitution is so much more satisfactory.

Thirdly, magistrates could be so much more understanding and get things into proportion.

In this case the man was stupid in not appearing in court – he didn't want to lose a day's pay. But more than doubling his fine is so heavy handed.

I was watching a traffic cops programme on TV last week where a motor cyclist travelling at speeds up to 126mpg for two miles was fined £750.

He had a top-of-the-range machine and clearly had money to burn.

He could so easily have had an accident and killed someone, travelling at speeds like that.

Come on, magistrates, £750 for actions likely to kill someone and £225 for having a wheelie bin overfilled by four inches? Magistrates, get your brains into gear.

This whole sad business is all part of this over-regulated, over-watched and over-taxed Britain of the 21st century and it's getting worse by the day.

We have "spy" cameras everywhere, we have more and more regulations coming at us from Europe and Whitehall every day and the tax we pay for all this over-regulation is crippling us.

And on the subject of recycling, the present situation is so hypocritical.

We have the government saying we must recycle more to stop rubbish going to landfill and encouraging all households to do their bit.

Yet every business has to pay for its rubbish collection and it all goes to landfill unless that business pays even more for a green collection. Hypocritical or what?