Labour MPs have been told to hold coffee mornings to talk to their constituents about immigration in a desperate bid to fight the threat of UKIP.

Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, has written to all MPs and candidates with a script on how to talk to voters about their concerns.

In a leaked document, she admits the party ‘got things wrong in the past’, but encourages MPs to challenge people on their fears about immigration.

Ed Miliband's MPs have been told to use chatting over coffee to tackle public fears about immigration

MPs and candidates have been invited to attend ‘drop-in’ sessions with Miss Cooper this afternoon as the party attempts to present a united front on the key issue.

The bid to counter the rise of UKIP comes after Labour suffered disappointing results in the local and European elections last month.

There are concerns that working class voters in its traditional heartlands are deserting the party in favour of UKIP.

The ‘immigration campaign pack’ tells MPs and candidates: ‘It is important people know that Labour are listening to their concerns on immigration’.

It adds: ‘Labour got things wrong in the past, particularly in not introducing transitional controls for eastern Europe. And we’ve changed on immigration.’

The documents contains model invite letters for a ‘listening event’, which it recommends should be ‘an informal event, for example a coffee morning’.

MPs have been issued with a series of responses to people’s worries about immigration when campaigning on the doorstep.

Among the advice, they are told ‘there is no evidence of an overall impact on wages’ from immigration.

The issue of benefits tourism is brushed aside with the statistic that ‘only 2.6 per cent of EU migrants claim unemployment benefits’, even though this still amounts to thousands of people.

The plan has been drawn up by shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper who admits Labour 'got things wrong in the past' on immigration

MPs are also told to rebut claims that there are problems with immigrants taking social housing.

Conservative MPs last night said that Labour needed to do more than hold coffee mornings to be trusted on immigration.

Priti Patel, Tory MP for Witham, said: ‘Labour’s legacy on immigration was an open door policy and invitation for all to come to Britain. Coffee mornings will do little to restore public confidence in Labour’s approach to immigration.

Labour MPs fear the impact of the rise of UKIP, led by Nigel Farage, ahead of the next election

‘The truth is they have opposed the measures proposed by the Conservatives to reform the broken and dysfunctional system they left. If they got back into power they would open the borders again and do away with the policies we have introduced to keep our borders safe and secure.’

Charlie Elphicke, Tory MP for Dover, said: ‘Labour are hopelessly out of touch. We don’t need coffee mornings, we need action.

‘Under Labour, pretty much everyone was allowed to wander into the country.

‘But under this Government, we’ve seen action to make our borders safe and secure and a crackdown on benefit tourism. We need to see more action like that.’

Earlier this month, seven rebel Labour MPs, including Frank Field, Kate Hoey and John Mann, published an open letter to Ed Miliband arguing that the unrestricted entry of EU citizens from eastern Europe since 2004 was hurting the ‘very communities that the Labour Party was founded to represent’.

The MPs said that concern with immigration had become an important priority for a large proportion of working-class and middle-class voters.

They added: ‘While the benefits of mass migration have been served in abundance to many wealthy people, who are in a position to take advantage of cheap labour, we believe that the lack of affordable housing, school places, hospital capacity and transport infrastructure to accommodate this influx of people means that poorer people’s living standards have been squeezed.’

A spokesman for Miss Cooper last night said: ‘We believe we should be talking about immigration a lot more and one way to do that is at coffee mornings.