My friend and former colleague Reay Atkinson, who has died aged 91, stood out as an adventurous senior civil servant committed to improving the economy and the well-being of his native north-east England. He played a key role in luring the car manufacturer Nissan to Sunderland in 1984.

Reay had seemed destined to become a permanent secretary in Whitehall. In 1973 he was chosen to head a new Central Computer Agency charged with delivering IT to Whitehall and then in 1978 became head of information technology at the DTI (the Department of Trade and Industry). But when Margaret Thatcher scribbled “poppycock” at the top of a report he had written, Reay’s days in Whitehall seemed numbered. He was told promotion was unlikely.

Rather than take a job on offer at the Royal Mint, in 1981 he headed north to become regional director of the DTI in the then northern region (which included the north-east and Cumbria). Although he was based in his home city of Newcastle upon Tyne, he and his third wife, Rita, decided to live in the north Pennines, at Garrigill. Fell walking became a passion in the nearby Lake District.

Reay had an immediate impact on the region. Although he was at times quick-tempered, his determination and diplomacy meant that he was one of the few people capable of holding together warring parties in a (still) politically tribal north-east. In a citation to honour Reay’s fellowship at Newcastle University, it was noted that “his northern roots, and a willingness to use a liberal interpretation of civil service rules, led some in the capital to worry that he had gone native”.

When Nissan was weighing up options for a UK assembly plant in the early 1980s – Sunderland, or Shotton, in north Wales? – there is little doubt that Reay played a pivotal role in successfully pitching for Wearside. In 1986 the Nissan plant, directly employing 7,000, was officially opened by Thatcher.

The son of a railwayman, William Atkinson, and a schoolteacher, Lena (nee Haselhurst), Reay saw wartime service in the Royal Navy, serving in arctic convoys and, subsequently, as a marine sub-lieutenant during the D-day landings in the course of which he was wounded. He was educated at Gosforth High school and graduated in history at the former King’s College, then an arm of Durham University in Newcastle, which subsequently became Newcastle University. He joined the civil service in 1950.

He is survived by Rita (nee Bunn), whom he married in 1983, a daughter, Susan, from his first marriage, to Joy, who died in 1955; and a son, Simon, and daughter, Sarah, from his second marriage, to Leigh, which ended in divorce.