SOUTH Hams MP Sarah Wollaston has made a U-turn over the European Union referendum.

The Totnes constituency MP and chairman of the House of Commons Health Select Committee said she could not support Vote Leave’s claim that if Britain were to leave the EU, £350m could be spent on the NHS – and would now be voting to remain in the EU.

Speaking to BBC political editor Laura Kuenssberg on Wednesday, she said the claim was ‘simply untrue’.

She added: ‘For someone like me who has long campaigned for open and honest data in public life I could not have set foot on a battle bus that has at the heart of its campaign a figure that I know to be untrue. If you’re in a position where you can’t hand out a Vote Leave leaflet, you can’t be campaigning for that organisation.’

Dr Wollaston also claimed there would be a ‘Brexit penalty’ on the NHS as withdrawal would damage the economy.

In an opinion piece for this newspaper, published in February, she said she would be voting to leave the EU.

Following Prime Minister David Cameron’s negotiations for reform of the EU, she said: ‘The European Union has missed an important opportunity for reforms that could have benefited all its member states and their citizens.

‘As a result, the Prime Minister has returned with a threadbare deal that has highlighted our powerlessness to effect institutional change.’

She added: ‘Referendums have a tendency to deliver the status quo. The point needs to be made, however, that neither choice delivers the status quo because, like it or not, within a decade our relationship with the EU will look radically different, whatever the outcome. Last week’s deal has underlined the reality that our Eurozone partners are continuing their separate journey towards full political and monetary union.

‘We will inevitably be bound by and disadvantaged by the decisions they make in their own interest.

‘The time has come for us to frame a new independent relationship as good neighbours rather than remain a discontented junior partner picking up the bills but with no power to influence the rules of the club.

‘The costs go far beyond our considerable net financial contribution, annually variable but between £8.5bn and £10.5bn over the past three years. The Common Fisheries Policy has been disastrous both for fish stocks and for our once thriving industry.’

She said that, in the event of Britain voting to leave the EU: ‘We would set out on a new path as the world’s fifth largest economy, confident, outward-looking, keen to maintain close co-operation with our European allies and open for business.’

In a blog posted on her website, she outlined her reasons for the U-turn.

She also added: ‘This has been an unnecessarily acrimonious and divisive campaign.’