Andrew Tierney of Hinckley, Leicestershire, has been fined £50 by his local council for having deposited two bits of junk mail in a litter bin. Hinckley and Bosworth borough council says litter bins aren’t for domestic stuff like letters, they’re for rubbish you find or generate in the street.

You may have read this story in one of your papers and sighed a little and perhaps wished ill-fortune on the petty, mean-minded, self-important bureaucrats who run our local councils, and particularly Hinckley and Bosworth borough council. Or you might have thought the story so absurd that the journalist made it up.

Today I can reveal the other side to the story, the council’s side. And the great thing is that it makes the council look even more fatuous than it did last Thursday when Tierney contacted his local newspaper to complain about the fine.

The council now alleges that Tierney did not deposit just two letters in the litter bin, but a whole sack of “domestic rubbish”. Tierney denies the imputation: “They’re just trying to save face. They’ve been made to look stupid, so they come up with this. Why didn’t they say that on Thursday?”

Quite; but more to the point, how did they know that this black bag full of “domestic rubbish” had been deposited by Tierney — unless, that is, they pay someone to rifle through the garbage with the sole purpose of persecuting rubbish-placement transgressors? Well, of course, on cross-examination it transpires that this is exactly what they spend your council tax on. Rubbish placement transgressor inspectors.

“If we find a black bin bag in a litter bin, we will sift through the rubbish and attempt to identify who put it there,” a council employee told me, with great patience, as if this were a perfectly reasonable thing to do. “A refuse disposal man will identify a black bag and then report it to his supervisor and a decision will be made to examine the contents of the bag and, upon identifying the miscreant, issue a fixed penalty notice.” You couldn’t make this up and, luckily, I didn’t have to.

There are other eternally vigilant people employed by Hinckley and Bosworth borough council whose job it is to persecute the residents who pay their wages. These are called neighbourhood wardens — “the eyes and ears of the local community”, according to the council spokeswoman.

It was one of these individuals who espied Tierney putting some litter in a bin and quickly filed a report. So they have people paid to walk the streets and make sure you don’t put letters in a litter bin and other people employed to sift through your rubbish and fine you if you do. Possibly people like you and I, possibly weird people whom you would not wish to sit next to at dinner.

The average council tax charge in Hinckley and Bosworth is £1,242.97 a year. Council tax charges have risen by about 100% nationally over the past decade. This is a small price for such extraordinary vigilance, such devotion to the cause. Quite what the cause is remains a mystery.

We are all of us subjected to a daily procession of small-scale miseries, visited upon us by a plethora of self-important statutory authorities. We cry when presented with our outrageous council tax bills and then cry louder when presented with the fruits of such expenditure; the bone-jarring humps in the road, the one-way systems, the salaries of Puerto Rican gay and lesbian community outreach workers, the obligation to separate our household waste into three neat piles, the penalties for transgressing a whole new bunch of rules and the severe warnings as to what will happen to you if, out of frustration, you verbally abuse or lamp some dull-witted, sententious council employee who is towing your car away because you exceeded the time allowed on the parking meter by 32 seconds, the police investigating somebody because he once said he doesn’t much like homosexuals, or Muslims, or Muslim homosexuals.

Recently a chap called Simon Thompson was fined £80 for having displayed a wearily raised middle finger to an inanimate object — a speed camera. You’re nicked, Mr Thompson, matey, under the Public Order Act. So not only must you never transgress the rules, you must not insult the technology employed to enforce the rules either.

Part of this may be down to a an over-abundance of elected institutions which, shorn of real decision-making powers, begin to throw their weight around over the most minuscule issues. They lose sight of the point that local people pay them to dispose of their trash, full stop — and start worrying about different kinds of rubbish and kinds of bins and employ strange people to police the whole thing.

Tierney has no intention of paying his £50 fine, I’m delighted to say. One hopes the whole thing ends up in the European Court of Human Rights, with evidence provided by those neighbourhood wardens and the council people paid to sift through the rubbish. The more absurd these officials appear — and the greater the publicity given to their spite — the more likely are the rest of us to rise up in arms against them. Good luck, Mr Tierney.

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