Maybe this was inevitable once the light/sports lobby started pushing hard.
I went to a CAA/DfT presentation 2 years ago, in which the DfT minister said that their research showed that since WW2, they found no instances where an on-airport fire crew had saved a single
GA life. (Obviously CAT is different e.g. the Manchester 737 but this was GA). If true, this is quite an eye opener.
Licensing doesn't exist outside the UK, as such.
However, "licensing" seems to have been operated very differently by different airports. I have been to some licensed ones where there is no fire cover as such - it is a rusting land rover parked in a hangar somewhere, with nobody around to drive it. At others, you have a lot more, and one I know of has a massive fire crew despite being 100% GA.
As regards obstacles, the rule change may not make much of a difference because one patently cannot send QXC students in a C152 to a 500m grass strip with 50ft trees at each end
The level of PPL training is not up to that kind of thing; performance planning is generally poorly taught. Training, especially solo flights, will have to go to nice and easy places.
My guess is that some airfields will drop licensing and will carry on as before, saving the fee. One example might be Panshanger. The bigger ones won't be able to because they have AOC ops; an example might be Biggin. A halfway case might be Shoreham, which has always had wild dreams of commercial ops but actually there is very little AOC stuff going on these days.
How much does a small airfield pay the CAA?