Having just read the requirements for the BIR, I understand it is competency based like the CBIR and somebody has to assess that competency, which would normally be an instructor who would then give you an idea of how many hours s/he thinks you would need to take to be ready to take a skills test. At the moment I think the only places that are ready to do the BIR are now ATOs and possibly one or two of the larger DTOs.
Most of the hours for a CBIR can be done with any instructor but most instructors tend to be found within the clubs which are also DTOs.
That instructor will then assess you as ready to do your 10hrs within an ATO. It might well be the same instructor at the ATO. If not they will more than likely discuss your abilities and usually that 10 hours is 10 hours at the ATO before skills test.
The 10 hours can include the simulator time, I believe.
Outside of that most instructors who are not instructing within ATOs or DTOs will have other jobs or have retired and many of them will be happy to do such things as differences training, eg tail wheel, in yours or their aircraft.
Any suitably qualified examiner can do your skills test for the IR or CBIR, I can’t find reference to that in BIR guidelines, I may be just missing it.
The examiner does not have to be attached to an ATO or DTO but the instructors do have to fill in the form to say you are ready to take the exam.
It is possible I am missing some of the nuances in the regulations for the BIR.
CB-IR: all but the last 10 hours can be done outside an ATO.
BIR: Basically training can be done outside the ATO, but the ATO must of course know that the student is good enough for that. Not many ATOs will do that without doing at least some flights. It says that the training must be completed at an ATO, but no hour requirements.
I believe the 5% was the repayment on the government loan to set up the CAA. Ted Heath was Prime Minister at the time.
The biggest problem we have in the UK is that the CAA is required to make something like a 5% return on capital, which is crazy. It goes back to some post-WW2 decision.
Considerably post war. The CAA wasn't formed until 1972. Before that I think it was the Air Registration Board. I have no idea what their terms of reference were, but in those good old Civil Service days I doubt that a profit element was involved in public sector stuff of this nature. I suspect that the profit motive was probably engendered during the brave new world of Maggie Thatcher.
If there is any evidence that it increases safety then keep it.
It has nothing to do with Safety; its all about keeping 3rd rate lawyers gamefully employed. Has anything ever come out of the EP in Brussels that makes any sense. If you blew it up the only people who would notice are those turning up with expense claims on Monday morning
Sadly I think your right and I don't think our own CAA and immune from this disease either.
There's an episode of "Yes Minister" which explains the national attitudes to regulation. It was the episode about a Euro-wide identity card. Sir Humphrey explains about the regulation: "the Germans will love it, the French will ignore it, the Italians and Irish will be too chaotic to implement it. Only the British will implement it fully and resent it"
... but I have a feeling that Germans are culturally less likely to complain than the Brits about some piece of regulation ...
That is certainly correct. But once a regulation is in place, no one beats the Brits in obeying it ;-) (I know because I spend a week each year in the UK for my recurrent training - during those weeks I learned more about procedures and regulations than in all my other flying and training together).
some private aeroplanes are only covered when the owner flies as PIC
That is really weird. Every UK insurance policy I have seen explicitly always covers flying with an instructor.
But then you get into the more complicated argument as to whether the instructor is PIC.
In a G-reg, the instructor is always PIC even if the LHS has all the papers to be PIC on the actual flight under the actual flight conditions. For example IR training in VMC, Class G, is fine for a PPL to be PIC. But no, that is logged by the LHS as PU/T. I don't know why this is, because it is self evidently not technically necessary.
It is only if you do some training much later that IME the instructor doesn't care how you log it. I logged my FAA IR to JAA IR conversion as PIC; I don't think anybody cared what I wrote in the logbook. But I had the FAA IR anyway so was 100% PIC capable even in Class A. JAA IR revalidations are also logged any way you like - the IRE just wants his £150 
In the US system, the LHS logs PIC in nearly all situations, so long as he has a PPL. Pre-PPL, he is flying on the privileges of the US Student Pilot Certificate (normally issued by the AME at the first medical).
I did a US PPL (in a rented N-reg, in the UK, via a long-defunct outfit) but on the back of a UK JAA PPL+NQ so was always PIC-capable.
I don't know about elsewhere in Europe.
So words like "only covered when the owner flies as PIC" could be a whole can of worms. The insurance should simply allow instruction of all types - except obviously ab initio PPL for which the premiums are going to be sky high anyway (due to the solo portions for example).
I don't want anyone to take this the wrong way but I have a feeling that Germans are culturally less likely to complain than the Brits about some piece of regulation, so it is hard to draw comparisons. And I bet the ex-communist nations are even less likely to complain...
The biggest problem we have in the UK is that the CAA is required to make something like a 5% return on capital, which is crazy. It goes back to some post-WW2 decision. EASA has undermined the CAA's ability to charge for a lot of stuff so they have shifted the charges onto other stuff and invented more stuff which they can charge for. The CAA is much more pro-GA than most people would give them credit for, but they are continually fighting a rearguard action to protect revenue. For example they have basically shafted the EASA-introduced flexibility on IR exam and training locations.
What do they do with all this info?
I don't know...
I'm tempted to simply register every permit aircraft at my home base as in theory I could do some instruction on them at any time.
What they really check here when you register a customer aircraft for flight training within your FTO is
a) that it has the required insurance cover for that (which I think is very sensible from my point of view as an instructor because some private aeroplanes are only covered when the owner flies as PIC) and
b) that it has a maintenance scheme (CAME) that includes 50 hour checks which are another requirement here for training aircraft.
