LONDON (Dispatches) -- Britain will increase military spending by more than 1 billion pounds ($1.21 billion) to avoid a real-terms cut over the next two years, the Telegraph newspaper reported on Saturday.
Finance minister Jeremy Hunt is expected to announce the increase in his budget in the spring, it said.
The newspaper said military experts estimate that the Ministry of Defense budget in 2024/25 must rise to 50.1 billion pounds from 48.6 billion to avoid a real-terms cut as inflation remains above 10%.
Hunt, in his autumn budget last month, said the government recognized the need to increase military spending and confirmed it would maintain the budget at least 2% of gross domestic product in line with its commitment to transatlantic alliance NATO.
“We have one of the largest defense budgets in Europe and in 2020 we announced the biggest increase to defense spending since the Cold War,” a government spokesperson told Reuters.
Any increases to military spending will be considered as part of the next integrated review, a document laying out Britain’s military, security and foreign policy priorities, in the spring, the spokesperson added.
The rise in military spending comes as the UK economy remains in dire straits.
The UK is forecast to fall into recession in the final three months of the year as soaring prices hit growth.
The UK economy shrank by more than first thought in the three months to September, revised figures recently showed.
The economy contracted by 0.3%, compared with a previous estimate of 0.2%, as business investment performed worse than first thought, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said.
Growth figures for the first half of 2022 have also been revised down.

The economy has been hit as surging energy and food prices push inflation - the rate at which prices rise - to its highest level in 40 years.
It means that consumers are spending less and businesses are cutting investment.
Household incomes, when accounting for rising prices, continued to fall, and household spending “fell for the first time since the final Covid-19 lockdown in the spring of 2021”, Darren Morgan, director of economic statistics at the ONS, said.
The ONS said that gross domestic product (GDP) - the measure of the size of the economy - was now estimated to be 0.8% below where it was before the pandemic struck, downwardly revised from the previous estimate of 0.4% below.