it turns out that the company what used to look after it has been sold by ITV to Arqiva (a big telecoms company but aimed more at major broadcasters and the emergency services).
basically Arqiva and Airwave (owned ultimately by the same company) can make much more money selling this radio spectrum to the feds and Whitehall and even British Telecom (who sold a lot of their wireless infrastructure to Arqiva) and the MOD have first call over a lot of this radio spectrum so the small fish are being pushed out of the pond and left to suffocate..
worst of all every one of these companies was once owned by the public to provide a public service rather than private profit..
