Lady Jenkin’s remarks overshadow launch of report examining rapid rise in numbers of Britons who are reliant on food banks

Attempts to establish a political consensus on how to tackle the growing problem of hunger in Britain came under strain on Monday as a Conservative who helped launch a cross-party report on the issue declared that one of the principal causes of food poverty was that “poor people do not know how to cook”.

Lady Jenkin’s comments – for which she later apologised – came at the Westminster launch of Feeding Britain, a Church of England-funded report examining the causes of the rapid rise in the numbers of people becoming reliant on food banks.

The peer told the press conference, which was attended by the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, that low-income people who used food banks did so in part because they were not skilled enough in cooking and food management.

Her words were in marked contrast to the conclusions of the cross-party report, which says structural issues such as benefit delays and cuts, coupled with low wages and rising living costs, are predominantly to blame for tens of thousands of families experiencing hunger.

“We have lost a lot of our cookery skills. Poor people do not know how to cook,” Jenkin said. “I had a large bowl of porridge today, which cost 4p. A large bowl of sugary cereals will cost you 25p.”

Jenkin, who co-founded the Women2Win campaign to boost the number of female Tory candidates in winnable seats, and who is married to the Tory MP Bernard Jenkin, later acknowledged that her words had been badly chosen and said she was trying to get across the message that home-cooked meals were often cheaper and more nutritious than packaged food.

She told BBC Radio 4’s The World at One: “What I meant was: as a society we have lost our ability to cook. That seems no longer to be handed down in the way that it was by previous generations.

“I am well aware that I made a mistake in saying it and apologise to anybody who’s been offended by it.”

She added: “The point is valid. If people today had the cooking skills that previous generations had, none of us would be eating so much pre-prepared food.”

Welby, whose foundation funded the inquiry, described his surprise when he witnessed people in Britain – rather than poorer parts of the world he had visited – queueing for food handouts.

He said: “How shocking it is to find this happening here … I’ve seen much worse very recently, but happening here it is in the wrong place. We don’t do that in this country and we need to stop it.”

The 50-page document included just a few lines on the issue of cookery skills. It notes that while some low-income households may find it difficult to prepare or cook decent meals from scratch, many other families “manage to buy and cook food on a shoestring budget for extended periods of time”.

It says some food bank clients are so poor they cannot afford to switch on their cooker. Others live in private rented accommodation where landlords equip the kitchen with only a microwave oven or a single-ring cooker.

Ministers, however, promised to respond positively to the report as they sought to avoid a public clash with the Church of England or the committee.

Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions minister, said he was looking at ways to ensure that claimants who had been sanctioned and lost their jobseeker’s allowance (JSA) need not lose housing benefit as well.

He told MPs: “We want to do everything we can to make sure that people do not stumble into a process of sanctions” – the loss of benefits entitlement that is one of the most common reasons that people use food banks.

Between April 2013 and March 2014, the latest dates for which statistics are available, 918,600 JSA claimants were subjected to penalties in response to a failure to comply with Department for Work and Pensions rules.

Duncan Smith announced that DWP staff were to be sent new advice telling them to constantly inform claimants that short-term cash advances were available to people before their benefit claims were processed.

Labour MP Frank Field, the co-chair of the inquiry, welcomed Duncan Smith’s announcements. “It is vital both that emergency payments are made available and that they are actively publicised to prevent the need for using a food bank.”

He also urged the government to “take further action to limit the amount of time it takes to process a claim”.

Roughly a third of the report’s 77 recommendations involve improvements to the social security system to make the administration of benefits more efficient, speedy and humane.

A food bank in Aberdeen. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod

Field insisted that MPs and peers on the inquiry committee had agreed unanimously on the report’s findings and its conclusions.

Emma Lewell-Buck, Labour MP for South Shields and a fellow member of the hunger inquiry, responded to Jenkin’s statement with a withering attack on the government’s welfare cuts.

She said the people who used food banks in her north-east constituency did so because of “poverty pay, welfare and benefit changes – namely unfair sanctions and benefit delays”.

She added: “Since the coalition brought in their welfare reforms, we have seen a harsh and punitive regime, and a culture that no longer talks to people about their circumstances or tries to understand their hardship but sanctions them without hesitation and cuts them off from any means of financial support without a care.”

Britain was going through “an age of hunger”, she said, adding: “It is a national disgrace that food banks have become a part of the fabric of our society, but thank God they are there.

“Because the reality is if it were not for the food banks and faith groups plugging the gaps left by the state, we would have had people starving.”

In its formal response, the government studiously avoided any references to benefit delays and low pay. The Cabinet Office minister Rob Wilson called the report “a serious contribution to an important and complex debate”.

The prime minister, David Cameron, speaking later at an academy in Crystal Palace, south London, said there were “elements” of the report into hunger that the government would “want to take forward”.

Labour’s employment spokesman, Stephen Timms, criticised the DWP for failing to send a minister to respond to the report, saying it was clear that government welfare policies had been “a contributory factor” in the growing reliance on food banks.

Some major food retailers said they would try to increase the amount of food they redistribute to food banks in response to the Feeding Britain report, but the retail industry lobby group echoed concerns voiced by poverty charities over whether supermarket handouts are a solution to food poverty.

The Food Poverty Inquiry report called on the Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap), an organisation that works to reduce waste, to set food retailers and manufacturers a target of doubling the proportion of surplus food to 4% of usable food.

Sainsbury’s, which co-founded the food redistribution charity FareShare 20 years ago, said it was not sure it could double the proportion of food it sends to charities.

Prof Liz Dowler, from the University of Warwick, said she welcomed aspects of the report but warned that concentrating on the role supermarkets could play in sending more food to charities risked depoliticising the issue.

“It is very dangerous for the current report to be suggesting supermarket waste can be a solution to food poverty.

“There’s no reason for these things to be linked up except in the minds of those who are too rich to have any notion of what it’s like trying to make ends meet on a low income,” she said.