National Insurance may need to rise to solve the crisis in the health and social care systems, says an influential Conservative MP, despite the party's "tax lock" promise.

Sarah Wollaston, chair of the Health Select Committee, told Sky News that a cross-party group should report what levels of taxation and national insurance could fund European-style services.

She added that Theresa May's "new leadership" should rethink the Conservative manifesto pledge not to raise taxes.

"We need to set out what it would cost with taxation and National Insurance to bring us up to the same kinds of levels of funding as France and Germany," she said.

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When asked if the manifesto commitment not to increase taxation prevented such thinking, Ms Wollaston, a trained GP, replied: "Indeed, and I think that is a challenge.

"But I think we now have new leadership in our Government, and I think a realisation that the scale of this is so great that doing nothing also needs to be set out to the public."

She continued: "Ultimately, if people want to have the service that we all expect, then we are going to have to be prepared for that at the kind of levels (of funding) that we see in France and Germany."

Image: Sarah Wollaston says ministers need to rethink the Tory pledge not to raise taxes

The MP was showing Sky News around Torbay, which has pioneered the integration of health and social care systems.

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"Torbay has long had a reputation both nationally and internationally for looking at ways they can join up health and social care," she said.

"That's having people working together across the two systems and also how they can have their budgets move more closely together to try to look at it not as a health pound or a social care pound but a patient pound."

On Wednesday, the National Audit Office criticised some of the efforts by David Cameron's government to fund such integration under its multibillion "Better Care Fund".

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But Torbay is considered the trailblazer for these services, with a population on average 30 years older than the rest of the UK.

The integration enables shorter hospital admission times, quicker discharges and more time spent at home for patients.

But at the same time, the general funding crisis is threatening the model where it began.

Ms Wollaston has warned the Prime Minister that an innovative budget sharing deal signed last year is now under threat.

A local doctor told Sky News: "If there is no increase in funding we are going to have to look at what we are going to have to stop doing."

Last month Mrs May hosted a cross-party group on social care featuring Ms Wollaston, Lib Dem health spokesman Norman Lamb and Labour MPs Meg Hillier and Frank Field.