  The study of symbiotic stars is essential to understand important aspects of
stellar evolution in interacting binaries. Their observed population in the
Galaxy is however poorly known, and is one to three orders of magnitudes
smaller than the predicted population size. IPHAS, the INT Photometric Halpha
survey of the Northern Galactic plane, gives us the opportunity to make a
systematic, complete search for symbiotic stars in a magnitude-limited volume,
and discover a significant number of new systems.
  A method of selecting candidate symbiotic stars by combining IPHAS and
near-IR (2MASS) colours is presented. It allows us to distinguish symbiotic
binaries from normal stars and most of the other types of Halpha emission line
stars in the Galaxy. The only exception are T Tauri stars, which can however be
recognized because of their concentration in star forming regions. Using these
selection criteria, we discuss the classification of a list of 4338 IPHAS stars
with Halpha in emission. 1500 to 2000 of them are likely to be Be stars. Among
the remaining objects, 1183 fulfill our photometric constraints to be
considered candidate symbiotic stars. The spectroscopic confirmation of three
of these objects, which are the first new symbiotic stars discovered by IPHAS,
proves the potential of the survey and selection method.
