An MP has admitted playing a popular puzzle game on his iPad while in a parliamentary committee meeting.

The Sun published pictures of Nigel Mills playing the hit online game Candy Crush Saga during a meeting of the works and pensions committee, of which he is a member.

The Conservative Amber Valley MP, elected in 2010, told the Sun: “It was a long meeting on pension reforms, which is an important issue that I take very seriously.

“There was a bit of the meeting that I wasn’t focusing on and I probably had a game or two.

“I shouldn’t do it but if you check the meeting I would say I was fully engaged in asking questions that I thought were particularly important in how we get the pensions issue right. I shall try not to do it in the future.”

The committee met last Monday and was discussing pensions and the insurance industry ahead of the chancellor’s autumn statement announcement.

Candy Crush Saga is a free to download mobile game but users pay extra for more moves to improve their score. Having started out on social network Facebook, it moved on to mobile devices in 2012, and is now played more than a billion times a day, according to developer King.com.