Stamp duty receipts fell by nearly £1bn last year as George Osborne’s 2014 reforms to shift more of the tax burden onto expensive homes backfired.
As much as £100m of the shortfall was caused by a seizure at the top of the property market, where transactions collapsed partly as a result of the punitive cost of moving home.
The drop came amid signs that house price growth has all but stalled. Prices edged up only 0.1% in January compared with the year before, with the average house price now £211,966, according to the Nationwide Building Society.
It was the weakest performance in nearly six years and was attributed to movers putting their plans on hold until after Brexit. Samuel Tombs, at Pantheon Macroeconomics, said that buyers were likely to “wait a few months for uncertainty to fade”.
