A warning that thousands of frustrated British voters are no longer ashamed to back the British National Party was today backed up by a national report.

Margaret Hodge, the Employment Minister, said yesterday that as many as eight out of ten working class white families in her East London constituency of Barking were tempted to vote for the BNP in council elections on May 4. The BNP is fielding a record 357 candidates, including for the first time one in every ward in Birmingham.

Mrs Hodge's comments were reinforced today by a report for the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust social policy research group, which suggested that up to 25 per cent of London voters and one in six across Britain had considered voting BNP.

The Trust said that feelings of "powerlessness and frustration", particularly in white, working class council wards where there was a fast pace of change, had led to anger with the main political parties.

Mrs Hodge said that many families were angry at the lack of housing because immigrants began arriving in the area and because asylum-seekers had been housed there by inner London councils.

"They cannot get a home for their children, they see black and ethnic minority communities moving in and they are angry. It is a fear of change. It is gobsmacking change," she told The Sunday Telegraph. "Nowhere else has changed so fast. When I arrived in 1994 it was a predominantly white, working-class area. Now, go through the middle of Barking and you could be in Camden or Brixton. That is the key thing that has created the environment the BNP has sought to exploit."

Mrs Hodge said that it was fear about the rapid pace of change, rather than racism, that was behind their concerns. She said that reports that she believed voters were considering the BNP because Labour had failed them were taken out of context.

But Professor Peter John of Manchester University, one of the authors of the Rowntree report, said that, on the contrary, many such voters did feel let down by Labour. The study analysed the wards in which the BNP enjoyed most support and found they were "white working-class areas" with little racial diversity - once natural Labour heartland.

"They think they have been let down by the main parties," Professor John told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. "They feel their voices have not been heard, the main parties have ignored them.

"I think if I was in the main parties, I would be worried about this - that I have not talked about an issue which one of my core constituencies thinks is important."

Jon Cruddas, the Labour MP for Dagenham and a former adviser to Tony Blair, warned that the BNP was "on the verge of a major political breakthrough". He said that the Government had stoked up problems in traditionally Labour-voting working-class seats by focusing its efforts on the Middle England swing voters who decide national elections.

This had "disenfranchised" communities in seats such as Dagenham, which were more interested in issues such as the availability of social housing, said Mr Cruddas, another of the report's authors.

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