A Conservative MP who enjoys an hour-long morning bath racked up water bills over the past two years of £662 all charged to the taxpayer.

On Tuesday, Tim Loughton MP, the co-chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on mindfulness, told a conference of international parliamentarians that he meditates in the bath every morning and commented that his contemplative habit was “not cheap”.

“I spend up to an hour in the bath every morning, just thinking about things,” he said. He was trying to illustrate how meditation practice, which MPs are campaigning to promote in health, education and the criminal justice sectors, can take place almost anywhere.

But what was not clear was that the bill was being paid for by the taxpayer.

Bills submitted under his parliamentary expenses show the elected representative for East Worthing and Shoreham has been spending close to £50 a month at times on Thames Water supply for his rented London flat.

“Tim’s not going to comment, but it’s a normal expense on the flat,” said an aide on Wednesday evening. “If you look up all the MPs who have power showers rather than baths, he may spend less.”

Earlier, Loughton had responded to press interest in his bath habit saying: “MP takes bath is apparently hot news in Westminster at the moment. However the real story was a conference I co-hosted at Westminster yesterday which brought together 20 MPs from over 15 countries to promote mindfulness as one of the ways we can help tackle the epidemic of mental illness.

“Mindfulness is not a universal panacea but it certainly can help in the fight against the epidemic of mental illness.”

He added: “I tend to get up early and plunge myself into my bath soon after 6am where I spend up to an hour reading through papers and articles for meetings coming up in the day ahead, but I also reserve a little part of my ablution time for some mindfulness meditation.”

Speaking earlier at the same conference, the sports minister Tracey Crouch has revealed that mindfulness, a practice derived from Buddhist meditation, has become a regular feature of working life in her Whitehall department and claimed it is now “very important in terms of policy development”.

The Tory minister told a Westminster conference exploring how the practice can be introduced into public life and politics internationally that since taking up the practice in an effort to come off antidepressants, she is now “a major advocate of what mindfulness does, not just to you as a person but also how we can use it professionally”.

145 MPs have already undergone eight-week courses in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, which is prescribed elsewhere on the NHS as a treatment for the prevention of relapse of depression. The cost of the courses is covered by the Oxford Mindfulness Centre.

Through meditation, it encourages participants to focus on the current moment and observe thoughts, feelings and judgments as things that come and go and to notice how the human mind gets easily caught up in thoughts that are not necessarily facts. People with recurrent depression who have taken an eight-week course are 31% less likely to relapse, according to analysis of nine trials involving 1,329 people.

But there is growing interest in how the practice can affect the quality of political debate and decision making not just in the UK, but also in the US, where the Democratic congressman and potential 2020 presidential candidate Tim Ryan has written a book on the subject: A Mindful Nation.

Anthony Seldon, the historian and teacher who has written histories of the premierships of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron, told the meeting: “The one quality that is missing from the heart of No 10 is stillness and mindfulness. Decisions such as the Iraq war, the way the Brexit vote was handled, the reaction to Grenfell Tower: the quality of mindfulness and heartfulness is missing. How do we get them to listen? You know what they will say. They will say they are too busy.”

Mindfulness meditation is a central part of Buddhist practice, but it was repackaged in a secular form in 1979 by the US academic Jon Kabat-Zinn as a treatment for pain and stress reduction for sufferers of chronic illness.

“I have become a major advocate of what mindfulness does, not just to you as a person but also how we can use it professionally,” said Crouch. “As minister in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport we have been very passionate about mindfulness. We do practice it regularly in the department.”

She gave the example of how the practice can improve focus in meetings, especially in the hectic environment of parliament.

“I discovered if I was being very mindful in those meetings, not only would a half-an-hour meeting be done in 20 minutes but I felt that both parties were getting more out of it. I also think it is very important in terms of policy development. I am pleased to say it is really beginning to catch on, particularly in education.”

Crouch told how she has used mindfulness as an alternative to medication to handle her anxiety and depression.

“After the second and third session I got it. It just clicked,” she said. “This was helping me: the breathing exercises, the understanding of who you are and how you can cope and the whole mechanism of what mindfulness is teaching you, how it teaches you to be in the present moment and not to be beating yourself up. I realised I had spent my entire time doing this professionally and personally.”