flashing blade and Grainger,
All the instructors I knew were about equally divided on that five hours instruments addition to the PPL. Some said it would encourage people to think they could fly helis in cloud, and was therefore a bad idea. Others said it would (a) scare the s*** out of them, and (b) just possibly save their lives if they looked up from the map to suddenly find themselves in IMC.
I'd got my PPL(H) under the old system, but asked to do a couple of hours instrument flying with an instructor the following winter, as I thought the second of those. We did around four hours in the end, and it both scared me and was incredibly useful. It also sharpened up my flying quite a bit. I still think it could save my life some day, but there's no way I'm going near a cloud in a heli if I can help it!