I would agree that IF one wants to stay in the UK then there is no point in a full PPL.
But take the wider picture: something like 80-90% of new PPLs chuck in flying for good within a couple of years. Is this a good thing? Of course not.
It depends on how cynical one wants to get but on the one hand the flight training business has no reason to care what people do after they graduate; the school has had its £8000 by then and apart from Night/IMCR there is little more to be extracted.
But the GA scene in the UK - operations from freehold farm strips excluded - is largely propped up by sales of fuel, landing fees, tea and chocolate cakes, to pilots doing what the Americans call "burger runs".
A good way to speed up the decline, and make airports take on more and more industrial-unit tenants and eventually sell up whole, is to give lots of people a license which prevents them going somewhere they can't drive in a similar time.
I know this is going to sound like an attack on the low-end GA community but it isn't meant to be. Everybody should be able to co-exist, but there is a lot of cross-subsidy in this game, and an occassional microlight popping into say Goodwood isn't going to keep Goodwood Airfield Ltd (or whatever it is called) in business.
IMV the NPPL was pushed by the flight training business, to introduce an item which would appear cheaper on their price list than the JAA PPL. This was futile because it takes a similar # of hours to reach the required standard. There was no will inside the CAA to prune down the ground school syllabus - just like there is no will among the JAA committee delegates to prune down the JAA IR syllabus.
So, what has actually happened is that most (about 60-70%) NPPL holders are previous PPL holders who have done it for the easier medical. Of course the NPPL could have never been pushed for that reason - arguing for an easier medical in the dinosaur world of aviation is like arguing that Myra Hindley should be able to exercise her human right to become a schoolteacher.
The cost saving is miniscule on the scale of a realistic VFR minimum currency budget which is perhaps £2000/year (20hrs of self fly hire).
EASA is making interesting noises on deregulation of VFR GA but everybody else is quite worried they are going to shaft IFR GA in the process. Which would be a shame since a large chunk of "purpose-full" flight is for business and similar stuff, and eventually most of those realise they need an IR.