Foreign secretary Philip Hammond has said he didn't "see the need" to make contingency plans for a Brexit vote.

He dismissed concerns over the government's failure to plan for Britain leaving the European Union, saying the process could take years.

And he said that if the government had made plans and they had leaked, it would have been "seen as an unwarranted intervention" in the referendum campaign.

Britain voted to leave the EU by 52% to 48% last month. David Cameron is stepping down in September and has said it will be up to the next prime minister to trigger the formal process of withdrawal, known as Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty.

Appearing before the foreign affairs select committee on Thursday, Hammond – who campaigned for Britain to stay in the EU – was asked why no contingency plans for Brexit had been made.

He replied: "I’m not sure that I see the need. The decision that has been made will be implemented over a timescale that runs into years.

"Its clear that an Article 50 notice … will not be served immediately. That will be done over the course of a period of time running into months."

Committee chair Crispin Blunt, a Tory MP, said the government had simply ended up delaying Britain's exit from the EU by giving the civil service an "instruction to do nothing".

Hammond said: "Throughout the referendum campaign, I drew attention – as did others in the campaign – to the likely consequences of a Leave vote and the reaction that I heard was that this was scaremongering.

"I think if we had sought to engage departments of state in preparing evidence of the likely consequences of a Leave vote and that information had found its way into the public domain, that would have been seen as an unwarranted intervention in the course of the campaign."