yep. wholesale reform is needed, parliament is no longer fit for purpose, MP's representation of their constituents is probably their third or fourth consideration after; party, donors, self (and political career). The Lords became not fit for purpose at least 150 years ago. Local government as you infer has little if any power because of centralisation, and the power it does have is often wielded as a stick to beat national government with or to highlight policy differentials purely for political purposes.
Democracy has simply become the ability to put a cross or a tick in a box (of it was ever anything more than that, I'm not sure) for a least worst set of candidates.
I'd disagree on life speeding up. We get the perception of rapid reaction, the projects I'm involved in (big corporate and government transformations) take as long or possibly even longer than when we did everything on paper. Decisions are often taken without consideration, opinions are instantly given without thought, actions undertaken in the understanding of changing it multiple times at a later date, because we have technology that enables us to respond immediately and often do the work quicker but without the thought necessary to do the work properly.
My own opinion is that parliament needs to be a representative body of constituents, with my aforementioned ideas around lottery selection, and that responsibility of constituent representation somehow enshrined in law. The office of PM should be separated from Parliament so that there is a proper process of parliament holding the executive responsible. A second elected body to replace the Lords would carry the role that the Lords s supposed to carry of being the legislative oversight.
England probably needs to be broken into about 5 or 6 regional assemblies as well. No government can create and implement policies for 60 million people, it just doesn't work. There's a book from the early 20th century i read when i was at college that made the claim (with I remember good justification) that cities of 1 million people are about the limit of governability (because of humanistic factors) and nations over 15 million become impossible to govern, system and entity hegemony become the predominant forces, and people (or at least 95% of them) are simply the resources of those systems and entities.