Britain should require more “active integration” of migrants, Kemi Badenoch has said, as she drew inspiration from Denmark’s so-called “anti-ghetto” laws.

The Conservative leader said she had “looked at” the Danish model and said it was “one of the things I’ll be talking about more”.

In the Scandinavian country, social housing areas with high levels of deprivation and a “non-western” population above 50 per cent are declared “parallel societies”.

• How Denmark’s left sent migrants packing

Such a declaration can trigger requirements to reduce the amount of social housing in an area, including through evicting residents and demolishing or turning their homes into private housing. Restrictions can also be placed on who can move there.

Badenoch said she backed “that sort of thing” when asked whether she would consider a similar policy.

She said: “I think integration is not enough. I say assimilate, I think assimilation should be the target, and if people don’t assimilate, then they integrate.

“But we’ve had so many, so many people, so high numbers, people from lots of different places, which is not what immigration used to look like, and I think we need to move from passive to active integration.”

Adding this was “along the lines” of the Danish policy, she said: “We need to do what works for the UK.

“It’s not exactly the same situation, we have a much bigger population, and so many other things that would require adjustments — but that sort of thing, yes.”

The Danish laws have been criticised by human rights groups, including a panel of United Nations experts who argued they discriminate against people based on their ethnicity.

The government in Denmark has aimed to dismantle urban neighbourhoods with high concentrations of social problems and “non-western” people. The Danish state has vowed to eliminate 12 neighbourhoods classed as “parallel societies” by 2030 through a “ghetto package” of measures such as emptying, selling off, or in some cases demolishing blocks of social housing.

It argues that this is necessary for social cohesion and a functional welfare state.

During an appearance at an event hosted by the Policy Exchange think tank on Monday, Badenoch said she did not want to see an “active state” apart from in areas such as policing and defence.

Despite trailing third in most opinion polls for the last two months, Badenoch said the Tories would be “the adults in the room” as she rubbished Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s party.

• Tories defecting to Reform is a good thing, says Kemi Badenoch

She said: “We are not Reform, and we will never be Reform. Reform is a party that tells people whatever it is they want to hear to get elected.

“That is how we got ourselves into the mess we are in now. We said we were going to do things, and then we didn’t deliver them, because we had not thought about how we would do so and what the consequences would be. Immigration being a classic example, where it was just something we’d work out later.”