The BBC is under pressure to hold its own investigation into Gregg Wallace as the MasterChef presenter faces mounting allegations of sexually inappropriate behaviour.
Banijay UK, the company that produces the cooking show for the BBC, is already conducting a review to "fully and impartially investigate" claims about Wallace's conduct.
However, the BBC has now been urged to launch its own inquiry to ensure it is kept "accountable".
It follows the corporation's decision to pull its two MasterChef Christmas specials after having initially resisted pressure to take content featuring Wallace off-air.
Rachel Taylor, a Labour MP who sits on the Commons Women and Equalities Committee, said licence fee-payers would expect the BBC to "properly" investigate complaints linked to one of its programmes.
Asked if she thought it was a "mistake" for the corporation to defer to Banijay for the inquiry, she said: "I think so. I mean, most viewers see these programmes as BBC programmes, and they would look to the BBC to be dealing with these serious allegations and investigating things properly."
She added: "I think the BBC should be accountable to their viewers. It's the BBC we pay our licence fee for and they should be seen to be over this, making sure that they're not engaging on our screens somebody who is responsible for this sort of behaviour."
Wallace, 60, "stepped away" from his MasterChef role last week in the wake of claims published by The Telegraph as part of a four-month investigation into his alleged behaviour.
His lawyer has stated that he denies allegations of sexual harassment and Wallace mounted a personal defence on Instagram, claiming the accusations came from "a handful of middle-class women of a certain age".
The comments generated major backlash, with Downing Street describing them as "misogynistic". Wallace later apologised and said he was under a "huge amount of stress".
The Telegraph's investigations team heard from a former colleague who claimed that Wallace held her head and thrust his body towards her while mimicking a sex act when she was kneeling in front of him to clean a mark off his trousers.
One complainant claimed that the presenter walked into the MasterChef studio "completely naked except for a sock pulled over his penis" before doing a "silly dance".
It has since emerged that some complaints date back more than a decade. Emma Kennedy, who won Celebrity MasterChef in 2012, claimed she had seen the presenter "grope" a camera assistant during a photoshoot that year.
Writing for The Telegraph, MasterChef contestant Aasmah Mir, who appeared on the show in 2017 and complained about inappropriate comments Wallace made during filming, said: "The BBC made me feel that things would be fixed; I naively believed they would sort this.
"Subsequent allegations, not just on MasterChef but on two other shows, would suggest I was a fool."
The BBC announced on Tuesday that it would pull the MasterChef Christmas specials after Bectu, the TV workers' union, said airing the show "as normal" would be upsetting and could cause "stress and anger" for staff who may have been inappropriately treated in the workplace.
However, the broadcaster has so far refused to remove a cache of programmes fronted by Wallace on iPlayer.