THE government should allow in far more than the 4,000 refugees per year it has pledged to accept, shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper told MPs yesterday.

The Labour leadership contender hit out at Prime Minister David Cameron’s promise that Britain would receive 20,000 Syrian refugees by May 2020 from camps around the war-torn country.

She said his plan was being overshadowed by the selflessness shown by British people and the country’s own efforts in past decades.

The government should speak to councils, charities and faith groups to assess how many people they could help and then support them in doing so, Ms Cooper suggested in the emergency Commons debate.

“The crisis is now. Helping 4,000 a year is not enough,” she said, adding that the crisis was an “opportunity” to work with other EU nations to resettle 10,000 refugees in Britain by Christmas.

The Tories are “plucking numbers out of the air,” Labour MP Geraint Davies said, noting that many of his constituents in Swansea West had contacted him to say that they wanted to help.

Sheffield and Birmingham councils have also pledged support, as well as the Welsh and Scottish governments, Ms Cooper added.

A refugee living in north London has raised more than £14,000 alone to “do his bit” for other refugees, Hornsey and Wood Green’s Labour MP Catherine West told the Commons.

People ready to help alleviate the humanitarian crisis are “the best of Britain,” Ms Cooper replied, stressing that Home Secretary Theresa May needed to step up with a “serious plan.”

Britain should to do more because it helped 10,000 Jewish children in nine months during the second world war, 19,000 Vietnamese people in the 1970s and 24,000 Kosovans fleeing war in the late 1990s, she added.

Ms May told MPs that the government had been doing and would continue to do “everything it can” to help those in need of immediate aid with four “main efforts.”

They are “providing aid directly to those who need it, stopping people from putting themselves in danger as they seek our help, resettling those who most need our protection and leading international efforts to bring the situation to an end as swiftly as possible.”

Ms May added: “We will work with the UNHCR, we will scale up as quickly as we can, but I am sorry to say I cannot put a figure on the first year.”