Alison Halford, who has died aged 84, became Britain’s highest-ranking female police officer when, in 1983, she was appointed assistant chief constable of Merseyside. In her frank and celebrated memoir, No Way Up the Greasy Pole (1993), she described in detail the battles that women officers encountered in the decades before Cressida Dick became commissioner of the Metropolitan police in 2017.
During her time in the service, Halford fought and won a sex discrimination case against Merseyside police, and obtained a ruling from the European court of human rights that led to a change in the law.
After leaving the police, she went into politics, initially with the Labour party in Wales before switching to the Conservatives.
Halford was a young woman training to be a dental hygienist in London in the early 1960s when a chance invitation to make up the numbers at a Metropolitan police concert changed the course of her life. Aged 22, she applied to join the Met.
Her career got off to a lively start and she soon became a detective constable in the CID. Accepted on to a “fast track” promotion course, she reached the rank of inspector by the age of 27, and became the first woman to take operational charge of a police station – Tottenham Court Road in central London.
In the first 21 years of her career she had 18 different roles, rising to the rank of chief superintendent and working both within Scotland Yard and at the Hendon police training college. She also became a key figure in the setting up of rape crisis centres, and played a major role in changing the way that children and female victims of abuse were interviewed by police, with women officers coming to the fore in practices that were adopted by other forces across the country.
She applied for the Merseyside job despite the fact that few women were considered for such senior roles in those days. In her new post she became the most senior policewoman in the country.
Already a high-profile voice for women in the service, in 1987 she ruffled feathers with an article in Police Review magazine in which she suggested that “there appears to be a strong but covert resentment or mistrust of the competence of a woman who can get to the heart of a problem, shows creativity and innovation, and manages to acquire a reputation for getting things done”.
Her Greasy Pole memoir also made waves, as few female officers had gone into print in such detail.
It was not until 2022, when Jackie Malton’s memoir, The Real Prime Suspect, was published, that some of the extraordinary sexism that women officers had to deal with routinely was fully exposed, and Halford’s book had a major effect both within the service and on would-be female officers. Malton herself found Halford “hugely inspirational … Halford was a strong character in an era of policing where the glass ceiling for women hadn’t been broken. She was direct and said it how it was.”
The experiences Halford shared were, according to another colleague, an early precursor of what was to come in the misogyny exposed by Louise Casey in her review into police culture and conduct published in 2023.
Over the next decade Halford was repeatedly passed over for promotion within Merseyside and was also turned down by other forces in her attempts to find senior roles elsewhere.
Her battles with the service went public in 1991 when she brought a sex discrimination case against the police and the Home Office. The police responded by bringing charges of misconduct against her; she was accused of failing to maintain contact with her office, and of stripping to her underwear during a life-saving demonstration at the backyard pool of the Tranmere Rovers chairman Peter Johnson.
Halford always claimed that this incident, leaked in lubricious detail to the tabloid press, had been grossly exaggerated.
A settlement was finally reached the following year, and Halford received a lump sum of £142,600 including her pension entitlement, a £10,000 ex gratia payment and an annual pension of £35,836. She welcomed “the end of a two-year nightmare”.
Born in Norwich, Alison was the daughter of William Halford, an accountant, and his wife, Yvonne (nee Bastien). After leaving Notre Dame convent grammar school in Norwich, she spent three years in the Women’s Royal Air Force and then moved to London to study dental hygiene, but instead joined the police.
In 1984 she was awarded the police long service and good conduct medal. Taking early retirement on health grounds in 1992 as she suffered from arthritis, Halford moved to north Wales. In 1995 she was elected as a Labour member of Flintshire county council, then, from 1999 to 2003, as member for Delyn in the Welsh assembly (now the Senedd Cymru). In 2006 she switched to the Conservatives, becoming an adviser on home affairs.
In 1997 she won a phone-tapping case against her former colleagues, the then home secretary and the government in the European court of human rights, in relation to her sex discrimination case. This led in part to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000).
Her interactions with Merseyside police continued unexpectedly into her retirement, when she became involved in the case of Eddie Gilfoyle, from Wirral, who was convicted in 1993 of murdering his pregnant wife, Paula, and spent 18 years in jail, but has always protested his innocence and has had his case twice referred for appeal.
Halford expressed her reservations about the police’s handling of the case, visiting Gilfoyle in jail and becoming convinced of his innocence. His legal team have described her as “an ally” in the battle to clear his name. In 2016 she called for the police to be “held to account” over Gilfoyle’s conviction.
As well as No Way Up the Greasy Pole, she published Leeks from the Back Benches (2007), on the early years of the Welsh parliament, and wrote the foreword to Coming Out of the Blue (1993), by Marc E Burke, about the experiences of gay and lesbian police officers.
• Alison Halford, police officer and politician, born 8 May 1940; died 22 February 2025
