NEW house prices are too high and the rate of increase is becoming a cause for serious concern, the Minister for the Environment Mr Howlin said yesterday.

He said the rate of increase in new house prices was "so much at variance with the inflation rate" that it was becoming a cause for concern. Earlier this week, the Department of the Environment released data showing that new house prices rose 14 per cent on average last year.

Mr Howlin said in recent weeks the Government had been examining several proposals regarding planning to deal with the problem. He and Mr Tony Barry, chairman of the review committee said house prices would only ease when a substantial amount of building land becomes available.

Mr Howlin said if he had remained as Minister he would have been in favour of examining growth areas and plan national strategies for developing those areas.

He said he would prefer this approach rather than "allowing developers to set the pace in an ad hoc or unstructured way." If there is a deficiency in our planning system it is the "bittiness" of the planning system that has developed from the 1960s, he said.

"Each county has an individual plan, but when you sea them all together they don't necessarily make a rational method."

He said it was now crucial to develop a regional and national plan, so that county plans were "logical subsets" of them. "This would mean there would be growth centres, funded in infrastructural terms, rather than developers demanding infrastructure in an ad hoc unplanned way to follow market pressures.

The report recommends that further information should be sought within one month of a planning application being made.