But the 8,000 employees who fill two gray buildings here known informally as 'the Ministry' all work for the government. And their boss, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, is about to send many of them home for good.
Most work for Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, the tax agency. Their jobs are the legacy of decades of spending -- especially by the prior Labour Party government -- that pumped public money into Longbenton and similar places as factories closed.
As Britain grapples with a massive budget deficit, Mr. Cameron is now intent on weaning Britain off public money in hopes of reviving private enterprise.
On Thursday, he gave a taste of what's to come, announcing plans to eliminate 192 independent government agencies.
In Longbenton, the belt-tightening will result in a flood of pink slips at the Ministry, coupled with a regional push to establish a private-sector niche in the renewable energy industry.
Even with the pending layoffs, job seekers here still reflexively turn to the government for work. Clutching his educational certificates, David Henderson recently showed up at the revenue and customs office seeking work as a security guard.
'There's just no jobs anywhere,' said Mr. Henderson, who lost his job as a manager at a wholesaler more than two years ago.
Mr. Cameron's ability to point people like Mr. Henderson to private-sector work will be key to the broader plan he is expected to unveil this month to prune the British state. His goal: retool the sputtering economy with dramatic cuts in public spending even larger than those carried out by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s.
At a time of huge budget deficits in many economies, Mr. Cameron's plans represent a gamble on the idea that slashing state spending in a weak economy will restore market confidence in government finances and encourage private business to invest and hire enough to drive growth.
The plans of the Conservative Party leader, who heads a five-month-old coalition government, would make the U.K. the most aggressive deficit-cutter among major economies.
The plan will entail a combination of spending cuts and tax increases that Mr. Cameron's government says will reduce Britain's borrowing by GBP 113 billion ($180 billion) a year by 2015, or 6.2% of that year's expected gross domestic product.
The government's independent budget forecaster has predicted that more than 600,000 public-sector jobs will be lost over that period, about a tenth of the current total.
To fill the void, the government hopes to encourage investment from private businesses -- partly through tax cuts -- to develop regional industry clusters, such as wind power in the northeast.
More broadly, success could reshape one of the world's biggest economies and bolster the political grip of the Tories, who regained power in May for the first time since 1997. Government currently accounts for 51.5% of the U.K.'s gross domestic product, compared with about 41% in the U.S. and above the 50.7% average in the European Union.
But the cuts could backfire, toppling the U.K. back into recession and squandering the Conservatives' moment in charge.
Unemployment in the northeast is already more than 9% -- the highest in the U.K., where the national average is 7.7% -- and will climb higher if Mr. Cameron cannot kick-start the private sector.
Politicians filled the vacuum with public-sector jobs starting in the 1970s, swelling government payrolls in the region. Business-creation rates in the region have been among the lowest in England.
Mr. Cameron argues that big government has crowded out private enterprise.
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