British Chancellor Gordon Brown has insisted that Britain has been fair in its auction of third generation mobile licences and will not return money to those who paid billions for them.
At a Labour Party election news conference, he was asked if the British government would offer rebates to telecommunications firms saddled with heavy debts because of the expense of the licences auctioned last year.
'We're not going to change our policy. It was a market-driven exercise. People bid in the normal way for this, and people paid the price they were prepared to offer,' said Brown.
The auction last year brought £22.5 billion sterling into state coffers - well above analysts' forecasts - making a major contribution to the UK's £37 billion net cash surplus in the financial year to the end of March 2001.
Brown said the telecommunications spectrum sold for use by third generation mobile devices was a national resource.
'We did the right thing, because this was a national asset. The spectrum was there, and people were prepared to bid for it,' he said.
The companies which won licences in last year's auction were Vodafone, British Telecom, Orange, Deutsche Telekom's One2One, and TIW UMTS, controlled by Hong Kong's Hutchison Whampoa.
