I found this article about how poorly Google handles UK long tail searches writte by Dan Sharp quite informative:

Since I complained about the geo problems in Googles UK SERPS last year, there have been improvements. Some of the generic phrases which I noted had non UK orientated sites (ie. sites that dont even sell to the UK) in the results have improved significantly.
However, there is still a geo problem in the Google UK SERPs which is more noticable on the longer tail queries (as you might expect). Higher authority domains that dont target the UK, still manage to overcome the geo filtering and outrank UK targeted websites with more relevant content which from a user experience perspective is simply put, poor.

you can read the full article here