From Cranfield you cannot expect to fly for hours to another airfield and hence the short number of acceptable destinations, when you have to consider what other things are involved as part of the test.
Cranfield also has a made up SID which is used on the test too. Stony - Welin and its not in controlled airspace similar to Bournemouth. For those that don't train at Cranfield or Bournmouth, you obviously only train in the sim for those airfield departures / practise tests and locally to your training airfield to get the flight time.
Hopefully it will reduce the cost, on test day I personally paid a lot of money to fly to / from Cranfield and would have preferred to save that cash.
The EASA regulations coming in allow for initial IR tests by non staff examiners from memory. Sounds like other countries have been allowing non staff examiners for the initial IR test and the UK is coming into alignment.
Does anyone know what the other member states do for initial test?