The Home Office has announced that Paul Lincoln is to become the new director general of the department's Crime and Policing Group, replacing Mary Calam who is leaving the civil service after 25 years.
The Crime and Policing Group is responsible for leading the Home Office's crime reduction and police reform efforts, and Calam has been at the helm since 2013 after serving for two years as the department's director of national security.
Lincoln served as acting DG of the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism (OSCT) from December last year until March, and was the OSCT's director of national security before then.
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Lincoln has also held a number of senior Ministry of Defence roles, include head of defence resources, and was policy adviser to the UK's senior military commander in Iraq from 2006 to 2007. Thomas Hurd will this month succeed Lincoln as the permanent DG of the OSCT.
Announcing the appointment, Home Office permanent secretary Mark Sedwill said he believed Lincoln would "do a great job in this critically important role".
He added: "I’d also like to thank Mary Calam for her contribution to the work of the Home Office, most recently as Director-General of CPG, where Mary played a vital role in overseeing a continuing fall in crime levels while delivering a major programme of police reform. We wish her every success in her new role."
The Home Office's police reform efforts suffered a setback last year when the department had to delay its consultation on overhauling the way police forces are funded because of a statistical error in its data.
Speaking to CSW earlier this year, Sedwill said he was "deeply frustrated" with the situation and had commissioned an internal review "to find out exactly what happened".
Calam herself wrote to all police forces apologising for the department's mistake, although MPs on the Home Affairs Select Committee subsequently described the Home Office's response as "too little, too late".
Lincoln's appointment marks the latest change at the top of the Home Office. It was announced last week that a new joint unit for international counter-terrorism strategy, reporting to both the home and foreign secretaries, is to be established in the department, and will report to the FCO's Jane Marriott.