Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown on Friday promised a big boost in UK funding to tackle HIV and AIDS around the world when he delivers his spending review next week.
"In the UK our spending settlement for the next three years will allow the Department for International Development to allocate significant additional resources to fighting HIV/AIDS," Brown said in a speech at a development conference in Vatican City.
A Treasury source said UK funding for fighting AIDS world-wide would rise by about two-thirds, or 1.5 billion pounds over the next three years when Brown details his spending plans on Monday at 1430 GMT.
Brown said that development will be a key part of the forthcoming Spending Review as the government moves toward reaching its target for aid spending of 0.7 percent of national income.
"And on Monday I will announce as part of our spending review further increases in the UK's development aid budget in the years to 2008," he said.
But development agencies have criticised Brown for not coming up with a date when the aid budget will hit the 0.7 percent target despite his regular appeals to the international community to tackle global poverty.
Brown has also signalled a big rise in spending on national security to guard against terrorism from the current 2 billion pounds annually alongside the large increases already announced for health and education.
But this will still keep overall spending rising by an average of no more than 2.5 percent in real terms over the next three years, a much slower pace than the 4 percent rises since 1999.
Brown has had to curb spending growth as the public finances have deteriorated over the last few years as tax revenues dried up. And he has pledged that spending will not shoot up in the run-up to the general election and that the government will continue to meet its fiscal rules.
Brown has two rules for the public finances - that he only borrows to invest over the economic cycle and overall public debt is kept below 40 percent of GDP.
But Brown told reporters that despite the lower overall growth rate of spending, the government was still able to increase funds for its priority areas because it was paying much less in unemployment benefits and debt interest payments than in 1997.
He said that debt interest payments amounted to 3.6 percent of national income in 1997 compared with 2.0 percent now, delivering a saving of 19 billion pounds.
Benefit payments accounted for 1.5 percent of national income in 1997 and just 0.3 percent now, giving a saving of another 14 billion pounds, he added.
The resulting 33 billion pounds is nearly the same as the Ministry of Defence's annual budget.