Based on the official average house price in England — £291,000 — the stamp duty bill if a purchase had been completed on March 31, would be £2,050. A day later, April 1, and you really would have felt like an April fool, because the bill would be £2,500 higher at £4,550. That is a big increase in the cost of buying a house.

• House prices up 4% as buyers race to beat stamp duty deadline

Both these taxes are seriously flawed. Stamp duty, by its nature, only affects people who move, and is thus a tax on mobility and economic efficiency. It incentivises homeowners to stay put in larger homes than they need, even when children have fled the nest.

Council tax, cobbled together in the early 1990s when the then Tory government needed a speedy replacement for the deeply unpopular community charge (the poll tax), is one of the most regressive taxes in the UK, with the wealthy paying much less as a proportion of property value than those with modest homes.

Dan Neidle of Tax Policy Associates says that a three-bed semi in Blackpool pays more council tax than Buckingham Palace. The early 1990s’ antecedents of council tax are embedded, bizarrely, in the current system, with outdated 1991 valuations still used in England for establishing which bands properties fall into.

Any chancellor who could reform all this away would earn the respect of economists and tax experts and the gratitude of the public, as well as the approval of the International Monetary Fund.

There are plenty of proposals out there. In a paper last year for the think tank Onward — A Fairer Property Tax — Professor Tim Leunig of the London School of Economics proposed a proportional property tax, to be levied as a percentage of its value, with part of the proceeds going to fund local services and part into central government’s coffers. Higher value properties would attract a higher tax rate. Leunig knows about practical policy, having been instrumental in the design and launch of the furlough scheme when he was advising Rishi Sunak during his time as chancellor.

The pressure group Fairer Share, which endorsed Leunig’s paper, proposes replacing council tax and stamp duty with its version of a proportional property tax, levied at 0.48 per cent of its value. A £200,000 property would pay £960 a year.

One problem with such taxes is how to deal with people who are asset rich but income poor, such as a retired couple on a modest pension who happen to have bought their £3 million home in Hampstead decades ago when it was a tiny fraction of its current price.

This was the difficulty with Ed Miliband’s “mansion tax” policy, on which he fought and lost the 2015 election. Fairer Share’s annual 0.48 per cent tax would be £14,400 on a £3 million property. Its solution is that existing owners would face no more than a £1,200 increase compared with council tax, but a new owner would be subject to the full amount.

Professor Charles Goodhart, another distinguished economist who favours reform, argued last year that Rachel Reeves has the best chance of doing so since David Lloyd George was chancellor in the early 20th century. He would make the value of land, not property, the basis of a new tax. To avoid problems with its introduction, not least the possibility of a big fall in house prices, he would start small, with an initial tax of just 0.06 per cent of land values, rising over time.

The Tony Blair Institute (TBI) has also addressed these tricky transitional rules. It noted recently that a shift to a single property tax was a recommendation of the Mirrlees review of 2011. Sir James Mirrlees, a Scottish economist who won the Nobel prize for economics (the Bank of Sweden prize), conducted his extensive review under the auspices of the Institute for Fiscal Studies.

An immediate shift to an annual property tax to replace stamp duty and council tax would be challenging, the TBI argued, and “moving to such a system in a single bound seems politically unworkable”. As well as winners, it would create too many big losers.

It therefore proposed two interim steps. On stamp duty, it suggested homebuyers should be able to spread the cost over 20 years, by means of a government loan. If they moved again within 20 years, they would not have to repay the remainder of their loan. This would open the possibility of some revenue losses, although the average time now people who have paid stamp duty spend in the home they have purchased is 26 years.

The other transitional proposal would be to set the new property tax at a 0.5 per cent rate, but with a floor of £1,350 — even for properties worth less than £270,000 — and a cap of £6,250, even for much higher value properties, “to avoid a replay of the ‘mansion tax’ debate of the mid-2010s and overly penalising the asset rich but cash poor”.

Something is stirring, in the think-tank world at least, and there are plenty of ideas around. There is little evidence so far though from ministers, including the chancellor, of a desire to reform a flawed system of property taxes and perhaps raise some much-needed net revenue in the process. The pressure for change needs to be maintained. Our flawed property taxes are damaging.