What no one can deny is that there's ****** all training hours required for this NPPL. The outcome may or may not be 'sub standard' depending on the quality and commitment of the instructors involved.
What it is, is a tacit admission from the UK CAA that the out of control JAA bureaucratic monster was about to utterly and irretrievably engulf and destroy private flying in the UK at the expense of a great loss of potential government income. Remember that this new wondrous NPPL is still going to cost damn near twice as much as a 'proper' FAA PPL
The UK government has pursued a single minded policy for many years of treating flying training as a rich idiots' luxury and bleeding it for as much tax income as it possibly can without putting anything back into the training infrastructure. They have done nothing but increase the cost, complexity and generally stick the boot into private flying training for many decades, and any encouragement that was on offer was reserved for the big commercial training providers. They were forced to sit up and take notice several years ago, when the large commercial schools in the UK began packing their students off in great numbers to places like Jerez, Michigan and Adelaide, proof positive that they had finally bled commercial training to death, and meanwhile by signing up to this JAA thing there wasn't much they could do to stop the commercial training business going elsewhere. In order to keep their cash cow alive, they then had to do something to stimulate the almost-dead corpse of private flying which the JAA had buried under a tidal wave of spiralling cost and complexity. They wouldn't of course have wanted to do something
really radical to cut the cost of flying, like abolishing VAT on training or reducing Avgas tax, that could actually have the potential for long term reduction in tax dollars earned! Far better to attempt to get more people flying by reducing the number of training hours required for the licence, while still making the same extortionate tax profit on a per-flying-hour basis
Hence the NPPL. Good luck to them all, I know I wouldn't have trusted myself to be turned lose on the flying public after only 32 hours. I'm sure the potential is there to rejuvenate private flying if it's all approached correctly and responsibly ... however it's been cut right to the bare minimum of safety in my opinion, and it's my fear that a few cowboy hour builder instructors will take advantage of these new regulations and end up with unnecessary blood on their hands. Only time will tell ...