[G8HQP Dave]

If you take a quasi-government organisation and then tell it to stand on its own two feet then this is the sort of thing which happens. An accountant, or someone who thinks like an accountant, will have been told that he has to make £100k from sales of some standard. He can sell 100 copies at £1k each, or he can sell 10000 copies at £10 each. The former is less work so that is what he does. Nobody told him that he also has a responsibility for disseminating standards as widely as possible, and his former responsibility of being a good citizen and making the UK a better place has been removed.

I saw something similar happen when the electricity supply industry was privatised. My boss went to a management meeting and came back and told us "We are no longer in the business of making electricity; now we are in the business of making money". The resultant game playing seemed to take the government by surprise.

Internally, each department and section was told that it was now a 'profit centre' so we would all be leaner and fitter. The result was that if I asked a colleague in another section or department for some advice he would want a cost code to charge it against, or refuse to speak to me for more than a few minutes. Our bosses were astonished, and encouraged us all to play nicely together even though the structure they had set up forbad this.