Malmo: Denmark plans to reduce the number of “non-European” residents in housing developments across the country to 30 per cent or less within 10 years in the latest in a succession of tough proposals on immigration.

The ruling Social Democrats’ proposed “mixed neighbourhood” bill gives municipalities the right to create zones where they can refuse to rent to those who are not originally from Denmark, the European Union or European Economic Area or Switzerland.

The bill aimed to reduce the concentration of non-European migrants in public housing by moving them into private rentals and forcing private landlords with 20 or more homes to take them in.

“For far too many years, we have closed our eyes to the development that was under way, and only acted when the integration problems became too great,” Kaare Dybvad Bek, the interior minister, said.

Municipalities and housing organisations, he said, had in the past failed to intervene in time as large public housing areas entered “a negative spiral”. By denying non-European immigrants the right to public housing in some areas, the bill aims to engineer “a large-scale and targeted change in the current composition of residents in many of the country’s public housing areas”.

The government will also stop using the term “ghetto” introduced by the previous government to refer to housing areas with a large proportion of immigrants, replacing it with the terms “transformation area” and “parallel society”.

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Even the parties left of the Social Democrats broadly supported the new policy of breaking up the neighbourhoods, with Halime Oguz, housing spokesman for the Socialist Left party telling the Altinget website that she hoped that breaking up “parallel societies” would free immigrant Danes from “social control”.

Samira Nawa from the Radical Left party also gave the plan qualified endorsement, saying it was “good and healthy” to create more mixed neighbourhoods, but calling on relocation to be voluntary.