An environmental campaigner who was deceived into forming a long-term intimate relationship with a police spy is refusing to pay Scotland Yard a £7,000 legal bill incurred during her quest for the truth.

Helen Steel fought a four-year legal battle against police chiefs who were eventually compelled to apologise unreservedly for the abuse and emotional trauma she suffered from the deception.



As part of the battle, she pursued a legal challenge to force the Metropolitan police to disclose that her former boyfriend, John Dines, had been an undercover officer.

She incurred the bill for the police’s legal costs after she withdrew the appeal. She says she was forced to withdraw to avoid the possibility of being landed with a much larger bill.

The Met has employed a firm of lawyers to chase the outstanding bill and is threatening to take “enforcement action” against her if she does not pay by Wednesday.



Steel, who was one of the two defendants sued by the fast-food chain McDonalds in the notorious McLibel trial in the 1990s, said: “If the Met had been prepared to tell the truth in the first place, this appeal would never have been necessary. I don’t see why I should have to pay their costs for the cover-up.

“Despite their public apology to myself and other women who were abused by undercover policemen, the Met has done their utmost to protect the abusers rather than protecting the public.

“It is outrageous that in order to get the police to admit the truth, women who have been abused by police officers are forced to go through lengthy legal battles where they risk bankruptcy or losing their home.”

The Met said court of appeal judges had ruled that the costs run up by its lawyers to oppose the appeal should be paid by Steel. “Careful and difficult decisions have to be taken around public money,” it added.

The Green party peer Jenny Jones has written to Cressida Dick, the Met police commissioner, urging her to drop the attempt to recover the legal costs from Steel and “accept that it is part of the financial cost of poor and sometimes illegal policing tactics”.

Lady Jones added:”While I understand the legal imperative to recover such costs, I also see that there are times when common sense should rule.”



Dines was a member of an undercover unit that infiltrated hundreds of political groups over 40 years. In the 1980s he adopted a fake identity and spent five years pretending to be a leftwing campaigner.

During his covert mission he started a two-year relationship with Steel, an environmental and social justice campaigner, but concealed from her his true identity.

In 1992, Dines disappeared, claiming to be having a mental breakdown. Steel was worried he could kill himself. In reality he had returned to the police to resume his duties. For years, Steel investigated Dines in an attempt to establish who he really was.

In 2011 she joined seven other women who had been deceived by undercover officers to sue the police. The police resisted the legal action. In 2014 a high court judge ruled that police had to disclose the identities of two spies, but not those of Dines and another former undercover officer.

Steel started an appeal against the ruling as she believed the police should admit Dines’s true identity. She represented herself as she could not secure legal aid to fund a barrister.

At a hearing in 2015 she was warned that if she lost the appeal she was in danger of having to pay huge legal costs that could dwarf any damages she could win from the police.



“I wanted to continue with the appeal but felt the risks of continuing were too great so I withdrew,” she said.



That year the Met apologised and paid substantial compensation to Steel and the other women who had been deceived into forming “abusive and manipulative” long-term relationships with undercover officers. The police admitted that the intimate relationships were “a violation of the women’s human rights, an abuse of police power and caused significant trauma”.

