Talk of scrapping stamp duty and replacing it with a sellers’ tax, as well as rebanding council tax, would prove to be an uphill struggle for the government. Nation said: “The revenue foregone from stamp duty in the early years would be a problem and I think that sort of full-scale tax reform is disruptive. It is a bit ‘novel and contentious’ to use Treasury language.”Charging capital gains taxes on main residences above a certain price could also prove unpopular, he warned. I see this as similar to how the British public think about inheritance tax. It is uniformly unpopular even though the vast majority of the public won’t qualify and that’s because of the principle.