Worth speaking to the administrators and making an offer.
There is an entire industry of “drop catching” – re-registering expired domains the moment that they come on the market, and using them to host ads, or trying to sell them on. UK domains are sufficiently cheap that for domains that saw any reasonable traffic when they were live, the ad revenue will cover the registration costs.
If you really want the domain, it’s probably worth paying a drop-catcher rather than trying to get it yourself: we’ve got some drop-catching businesses that host with us because we can get them a few milliseconds closer to Nominet’s servers – if the domain is in demand, you won’t get it by trying to do it yourself.