One of the first substantive measures of public sector reform undertaken by the 1984-1990 Labour government was the significant staged reduction in funding for the government’s own research and development organisations, principally the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries, the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research and the Forest Research Institute. The rationale underlying the reduction was the belief that a certain, but unknown, proportion of the output of ‘government science’ was research that had commercial value to private sector users. The government’s advisors took the view that, if research did have a commercial value, then making it available to the private sector without charge was an ad hoc and undesirable to selected private sector parties.