LONDON (Bloomberg) - Prime Minister Gordon Brown, responding to concerns about a growing wealth gap in the UK, said the statutory minimum wage will rise to £5.73 ($11.34) per hour from October.

"This will be a 60 percent rise on the original minimum wage of 1999," Brown told Parliament in London yesterday. "Some people said the minimum wage would cost us two million jobs, but we have created three million jobs."

Brown's Labour Party brought in the UK's first mandatory minimum wage a year after it took office in 1997, initially setting the level at £3.60 per hour for workers age 22 and older. The main rate will increase from £5.52, a 3.8 percent increase.

The government is under pressure to help those at the bottom of the earnings scale. The gap between rich and poor is at a 40-year high, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a social research group, said in a report in July. Lawmakers and labor unions in industrial nations have called for higher taxes on the super-rich.

The minimum wage for 18-21-year-olds will increase to £4.77 from £4.60 and 16-17 year olds will get £3.53, up from £3.40, the customs and revenue service said in a statement. Almost one million low-paid workers, two thirds of them women, will benefit from the increase, it said.

The government has also increased the amount it will spend on making sure employers pay workers the statutory wage, the department said.

The Confederation of British Industry (CBI), the largest UK employers' group, welcomed the increase, saying it remains in line with the rise in average earnings.

The government "has taken the right stance by not increasing the minimum wage by more than the growth in average earnings, whilst also taking into account the prevailing economic climate and firms' ability to pay," CBI Deputy Director-General John Cridland said in a statement.

Average earnings rose an annual 3.8 percent in the three months through December, down from a four percent pace in November, the statistics office said on February 13. Without bonuses, wage growth quickened to 3.7 percent from 3.6 percent.