My friend and former colleague, Grenville Jackson, who has died aged 72 of lymphoma, worked as a planning officer in Lanarkshire and Greater Manchester before joining the Development Board for Rural Wales in 1977. Senior posts in economic development with other Welsh public bodies followed and in 2006 Gren joined the civil service in Wales. I met Gren the following year when I joined the Welsh government as director of skills, higher education and lifelong learning. He was a member of my senior management team and led the division that provided support to industry bodies and employers to help them meet their training and development needs. He was charismatic, energetic, a great networker and passionate about the ways in which education and skills can contribute to business development. Gren’s talents were amply demonstrated when the economic crisis began to bite in 2007-08. The Welsh government saw an urgent need to help businesses cope with the recession and to protect jobs. Gren’s team developed and obtained significant EU funding for the ProAct programme, which enabled employees who had been placed on short-time working to learn new skills, and provided wage subsidy support to help retain skilled staff who might otherwise be made redundant. The independent review of ProAct in 2011 praised its innovative approach and estimated that it had safeguarded more than 1,800 jobs, adding far more value to the Welsh economy than it had cost to run. Gren and his team had the satisfaction of seeing ProAct’s impact described in the New York Times in an article on job-saving schemes in the EU. Gren was born in Nottingham, the son of Eddie and Florrie Jackson, both factory workers, and went to High Pavement grammar school. He studied urban and regional planning at Oxford Polytechnic before joining Lanarkshire county council as a planning officer. Later he completed an MA in regional economics at Lancaster University and then took up a regional planning post at Greater Manchester council. Gren retired from the civil service in 2011; he was made OBE the following year for his distinguished public service for Wales. For more than 40 years Gren and his wife, Anne-Marie, lived in Bishop’s Castle in Shropshire, close to the Welsh border. He was active in local organisations such as the local Labour party, health board and tennis club, and was a trustee of the AQA Examination Board for nine years. He drove many miles in support of his home-town football team, Nottingham Forest, hoping in vain to see them return to their place at the top of English football. Gren is survived by Anne-Marie, whom he met as a student on the planning course at Oxford Polytechnic and married in 1972, and by their sons, Rory and Corin, and grandchildren, Leila and Seth.