Britain will sharply increase spending on anti-terrorism defences, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown said on Monday.
Brown said that in 2001, before the September 11 attacks on the United States, the government spent 950 million pounds on all forms of security measures.
That figure will rise to 1.5 billion pounds this year and 2.1 billion pounds in three years, he told parliament, as he laid out a detailed three-year public spending plan.
"Recent events demand we strengthen not just our national security, our capacity to prevent terrorist incidents, but our national resilience, our capacity to respond," Brown said.
The finance minister also announced that Britain's defence budget, for the armed forces, would be 3.7 billion pounds higher in three years' time, totalling 33.4 billion pounds.
The Ministry of Defence would "make the changes that are now necessary to continue to adapt technologically and strategically to the threats posed by international terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the rapidly changing global environment," Brown said.
Britain's top policeman John Stevens said last week he could see no end to the threat of terrorism hanging over the country, despite police working flat-out to prevent attacks.
Stevens, who announced his retirement as commissioner of London's Metropolitan Police, said London had already been the target of unsuccessful terror plots and that an attack on the capital was inevitable. Earlier this month, parliament's cross-party Defence Committee said after a five-month inquiry that a focus on fighting terrorism exclusively abroad ignored the threat to Britain itself.
More, well-trained troops were needed to counter the domestic threat, it said.
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