Morrisons turned away thousands of pasties because the delivery van turned up to the supermarket a quarter of an hour late.

The shocking revelation emerged in a damning report exposing the scale of food wastage in the UK. The report reveals that a food bank in Cornwall was offered the pasties after they were rejected by the giant supermarket chain.

It was a fraction of the 4.3 million tonnes of surplus food produced in the country each year – much of which goes to waste even while increasing numbers of families turn to charity to feed themselves.

Don Gardner, the manager of the Camborne, Pool and Redruth Food Bank, told the inquiry: “I had 9,864 Cornish pasties [offered to me] because the lorry was seventeen minutes late to Morrisons.

The report exposed increasing reliance on food banks (Getty Images)

“That shouldn’t happen. I was offered 30,000 spring greens the other day because they were going to be ploughed back into the field.

“I couldn’t have them because I didn’t have anywhere to put them. I was offered 10 tonnes of tomatoes from Kent because they were too big for Tesco.”

A spokesperson for Morrisons said the supermarket would investigate but could not confirm his testimony.

“We are puzzled by this claim because it’s our policy not to turn away fresh food from our depots,” he told the Daily Mail.

“We’d very much like to look at this further but it’s difficult when the report has no record of the time or location of the delivery, nor details of the supplier.”

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The inquiry, also known as the Feeding Britain report, was established to examine evidence of growing demand for food banks and recommend the creation of a new national body to address the crisis.

It called for action to speed the processing of benefits to ensure new claimants are not left for weeks without an income, stop “rip-off” companies charging higher prices to the poor and end the “scandal” which sees millions of tonnes of waste food destroyed by supermarkets and food manufacturers.

One of the report’s backers was the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev Justin Welby, who said he found it “astonishing” that so much food was being binned when hunger “stalks large parts” of the country.

Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby is backing the report's recommendations (PA)