> London is not monolithic; it has several local councils all with differing rules [...] I don't know why it isn't done better
Politically, London will never have a unified council because it would wield too much power over the presiding government. This is effectively what led to the downfall of the GLC (Greater London Council) - in the early 1980s the socialist GLC antagonized the Tory government to the point where Thatcher ended up forcing it to be abolished.
London produces so much of the GDP it would be very easy for a centralized London council to hold the national government 'to ransom' (this happens to some degree now with the London Assembly, but since the Assembly has little power over issues such as housing it's not as pronounced as it could be).
The upshot of this is you end up with a pretty crazy system whereby someone at one end of the street could pay twice as much council tax as someone at the other end (in the case of, say, Wandsworth - which has one of the lowest council tax rates in the UK, and Merton - which is more around the average). I would agree having a centralized London council would be far better than the current system, but there's no way it will ever happen.
Couldn't the government pass laws that would give it more power over a unified London council, so that the holding-for-ransom dynamic would be minimized? It seems like that would be preferable to uncoordinated city ordinances. (Here in the States, we've got tons of fragmented municipal governance arrangements, so I know there's no simple fix.)
Politically, London will never have a unified council because it would wield too much power over the presiding government. This is effectively what led to the downfall of the GLC (Greater London Council) - in the early 1980s the socialist GLC antagonized the Tory government to the point where Thatcher ended up forcing it to be abolished.
London produces so much of the GDP it would be very easy for a centralized London council to hold the national government 'to ransom' (this happens to some degree now with the London Assembly, but since the Assembly has little power over issues such as housing it's not as pronounced as it could be).
The upshot of this is you end up with a pretty crazy system whereby someone at one end of the street could pay twice as much council tax as someone at the other end (in the case of, say, Wandsworth - which has one of the lowest council tax rates in the UK, and Merton - which is more around the average). I would agree having a centralized London council would be far better than the current system, but there's no way it will ever happen.