Beags,
Were you involved in negiotiation of the whole accreditation package - or just the NPPL aspects?
It would be mildly interesting to know if the retention effect has ever been quantified - I bet it hasn't.
Seven or eight years (ie 2-3 cycles of staff officer tours) down the line, it is likely that the original concept of encouraging people to stay in the service to 2000-ish hours has been forgotten. It would be very easy to see a simplistic decision being made to not "waste" any staffing effort to defend a system that allows pilots to leave more easily. In fact, a cynic might even suggest that a career-minded personnel "manager" might even advocate dropping the scheme as new retention measure!
Of course, the flaw in the latter argument is that the effect of removing the accreditation scheme will be to encourage pilots to get on with the ATPL exams at an early stage of their career - as there is no benefit in delaying the inevitable. That process puts youngsters into direct contact with the route to an airline job and many of them quickly see the benfit of jumping ship as soon as they can.
PPrune Radar - I agree about Air Law and RT. But it would be much less of a problem if the military dropped the practices that are unnecessarily different.