A basic PPL is almost useless, and is pretty unsafe in reality, without a capability to (a) navigate using radio nav (GPS/VOR/DME) and (b) control an aircraft in IMC.
Unless you stay close to the circuits, which is what a surprising number of PPLs are doing.
In fairnes, there is a little bit of radio nav in the ppl training, but the magic box that says Garmin 430 on it, is best kept off
The really astonishing part is that you can do a night rating without an IMC. The likelyhood of getting lost as pretty high trying to navigate by map and stop watch is pretty high.