The new index will be launched by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM), the department responsible for housing, and will be based on numbers from various sources, including data from the Land Registry Department and the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML), an ODPM spokesman said.
"We already do a quarterly house price index. But we have always thought that there is a need for a monthly rather than quarterly index," said Gavin McGuire, the ODPM spokesman.
There has always been some confusion over the way house price indices have been calculated. For instance, the Nationwide Building Society said recently that house prices in Britain rose by 2.5 percent in August from July to stand 22.7 percent higher than a year earlier. But Halifax reported house prices slowing in the same period.
