The booming housing market is showing no sign of slowing down, with property prices and mortgage lending continuing to soar.

Swindon-based Nationwide Building Society said house prices jumped by 2.1 per cent during the April, the equivalent of more than £100 a day, to take the average cost of a home in the UK to £145,918.

The surge in prices also boosted annual house price inflation for the year to the end of April to 18.9 per cent, its highest level since June last year.

At the same time the British Bankers' Association said just under 97,900 mortgages for house purchase were approved during March, the highest figure since May 2002, suggesting the market looked set to remain buoyant.

The average amount people buying a new home were borrowing also rose to £109,200, up from £103,400 in February, taking the total value of the approved loans to a record £10.68 billion.

But Nationwide played down fears that affordability was becoming stretched and that the market was heading for a crash.

It said prices had risen by more than seven per cent since the beginning of the year, but it added that it still expected growth of 15 per cent for the whole of 2004, meaning price rises would have to slow to just under one per cent a month for the rest of the year.

It added that even if interest rates rose to 4.75 per cent by the end 2004, as it expects, mortgage payments for the typical buyer would account for 32 per cent of take-home pay, up from 27 per cent now.

but still well down on the early 1990s' level of 39%.

However, Kate Barker, a member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee, said house prices could fall.

She told the Yorkshire and Humber branch of the CBI: "As house prices have risen, it is however increasingly likely that at some point they may fall back, but it is still by no means certain either that they will necessarily fall significantly, or that any decline will be abrupt."

She added that the MPC, which is due to meet next week, should not shape its interest rates policy around any attempt to take the heat out of the property market.

Meanwhile Government figures showed that the number of actions entered for homes to be repossessed in England and Wales rose by 16% during the first three months of 2004, compared with the same period the previous year.

A total of 17,444 actions were entered, leading to a total of 10,049 orders being made, of which 5,851 were suspended orders.

However, despite the rise, the figure is still low compared with the levels reached during the 1990s, and it is slightly below the 17,468 actions entered during the final quarter of 2003.

The Department for Constitutional Affairs, which releases the figures, stressed that the number of orders made did not indicate how many people lost their homes as not all orders led to repossessions.