Understandable to be suspicious of the motives, but without knowing the full technical requirements that are being set down would it not be possible for some of the smaller broadcasters to continue to send an SD feed that's upconverted to HD by the time it's sent from the uplink station, as a way to get around this?
A 720 x 576 pixel video stream, given a decent bit rate, can still produce pretty decent results on some screens up to around 37-40 inches in my experience. A DVD that has been well encoded with multipass can make a lot of people struggle to tell the difference especially up against a HD channel whose bit rate is not terribly high. An old Sony LCD TV I had that was 32 inches did a pretty good job at masking the deficiencies of low-bitrate 544 x 576 widescreen broadcasts often used by many channels on Freeview and FTA at 28 East. It's with my sister now.