Incoming BIS research director only safe for a year

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has said that it swiftly appointed a replacement for the outgoing director-general for research and innovation, John O’Reilly, in order to avoid uncertainty close to the May 2015 general election.

Gareth Davies, who will take over as director-general research and innovation at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills early in 2015, will be in post until the job is opened up to competition at the end of the year, according to a letter written by Martin Donnelly, the permanent secretary at BIS.

Davies’s appointment to replace O’Reilly, who steps down as director-general research and innovation in January, was a “planned succession”, of someone already in a civil service post, that was carried out to “avoid the delay and uncertainty of a competition so close to the date of the general election”, Donnelly says in the letter.