Yeah, the flipside of this is that taxis in London are ridiculously expensive and anyone except tourists, the very rich and the very desperate will just wind up

Yeah, the flipside of this is that taxis in London are ridiculously expensive and anyone except tourists, the very rich and the very desperate will just wind up hiring a Minicab, which means getting into a filthy wreck of a car with a random stranger who inevitably looks like a rapist, which is precisely what taxi licencing schemes are designed to avoid in the first place.