David Blunkett has defended the government's asylum policy as figures showed a record number of applications last year.

The data confirmed that the number of people seeking asylum in 2002 topped 100,000 for the first time ever.

Some 110,700 people attempted to enter the UK - a 20 per cent increase over the previous year.

The data means that the Home Office is a long way from meeting the prime minister's pledge to tackle the problem.

Over 9000 people attempted to enter the UK in October, although the figure dropped in the last two months of the year.

Applications from Iraq and Zimbabwe accounted for nearly all the increase from 2001.

David Blunkett conceded that the figures were "bad news", but insisted that the government's approach would reduce numbers.

"The bad news today is that the asylum figures were substantially up on the year before," he said.

"There's no doubt these figures are too high and we understand people's concern. The provisional figures for 2002 are deeply unsatisfactory, but no surprise, with applications from Iraq and Zimbabwe."

He said that 2002 "was a difficult year" with scores of illegal entrants breaching Channel Tunnel security.

Blunkett said that large numbers of people housed at the Sangatte camp had tried to smuggle themselves into the UK to "abuse our asylum process".

"We have tackled all these problems and are beginning to see results - with a significant drop from October to December, as we implement the programme we started planning in the summer of 2001 which culminated in the Act which received Royal Assent three months ago," he said.

He hoped that the steps now taken by the government would halve the numbers and evidence so far showed there had been a big change.

The home secretary said the government was working with the UN and EU countries to consider overhauling the way the UN's 1951 convention is interpreted.

He was confident that the attorney general's appeal against a High Court ruling on part of the government's new asylum rules would be successful.

"People must understand that we mean business," he said.

Home office minister Beverley Hughes announced that clandestine entry to the UK had virtually stopped and the closure of the Sangatte camp in Calais had also had a significant impact.

The shadow home secretary, Oliver Letwin, said the data was confirmation that the entire system had collapsed.

"The whole system, I fear, is fundamentally broken, which is why Iain Duncan Smith and I have suggested that we scrap it entirely and start again with a rational system of quotas for genuine refugees who could be identified offshore by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees," he told the BBC.

"All sorts of efforts have been made by the present government to stem the problem and they simply haven't succeeded.

Each one has made it worse. And I fear that the prime minister is not going to achieve his target unless he engages in some form of statistical manipulation."

Simon Hughes, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman said officials only had themselves to blame.

"The real problems stem from years of government incompetence. Mountains of legislation have undermined the fairness of the system while doing nothing to address the administrative shambles," he said.

"It is nonsense to think that we can set quotas for the number of asylum seekers we accept because we can never work out how many will come to Europe in any one year. What we can do is make sure that across the continent we share responsibility fairly."