Britain shelved its home sales statistics today, adding to concerns over the quality of official data which help inform interest rate policy at a time when the economy is teetering on the edge of recession.
City economists and even the Bank of England have been questioning the reliability of several official date series including trade, growth and retail sales.
The withdrawal comes just two weeks after the Ministry of Justice delayed for a week, without explanation, the release of figures on home repossessions.
Latest property transactions data was due to be published by Revenue and Customs today but was postponed until September because of anomalies.
Revenue and Customs said an updated series of property transactions - which recorded a series low at the last outing - would appear on September 21st.
"Outputs obtained whilst updating the monthly series contained some significant and unexplained differences with the statistics published last month," it said on its web site.
"All months in the statistical series are affected, with the differences showing falls in some months and increases in others. We are working to understand the reason for these differences so that a reliable set of statistics can be produced."
Economists were nonplussed but said they were not the only official data that had caused problems.
"This is unusual, they don't often do this, withdrawing figures because the revisions are large - assuming that it is the revisions," said George Buckley, an economist at Deutsche Bank.
Notoriously volatile retail sales data wrongfooted analysts again on Thursday, reinforcing fears that official statistics are becomingly increasingly hard to forecast and could be making it tougher to get monetary policy right.
"Several data series are becoming unforecastable," said Ross Walker, an economist at RBS. "I don't think there is a great risk of a major policy error but it probably does mean that it increases the chances of an error. The bigger risk is it delays policy from becoming pre-emptive."
The ONS, which is also replacing its main measure of wages because it was found it did not capture the true picture, relocated from London to Newport in Wales this year in a move to cut down on costs - leading to a large number of staff changes.