Stop wasting aid cash or we’ll withhold £30m, May tells UN

THERESA May last night threatened to fine the United Nations tens of millions of pounds unless it improves the way it spends aid money.

In a combative speech, the Prime Minister savaged the UN for shortcomings that ‘risk undermining the confidence of states as members and donors’.

Speaking at the UN General Assembly in New York, Mrs May said the UN suffered from a ‘seemingly unbridgeable gap between the nobility of its purposes and the effectiveness of its delivery’.

She added: ‘The UN and its agencies must win our trust by proving to us and the people we represent that they can deliver.’

She said that up to 30 per cent of Britain’s core funding for the UN could be withheld in future unless it raises its game. This could amount to a financial penalty of about £30million a year for the global institution. The threat does not cover the £2billion a year the UK gives the UN for aid and peacekeeping programmes. But it is designed to force the organisation to improve its performance.

Sources said ministers were determined to see greater transparency, efficiency and accountability over the way the UN spends British taxpayers’ money.

In a wide-ranging speech yesterday, Mrs May also took a swipe at Donald Trump for his decision to pull the US out of the Paris climate change agreement.

She attacked North Korea’s race to build a nuclear weapon and urged China to act to restrain its belligerent ally.

And she criticised Russia for war-mongering in Ukraine and blocking a peace deal in Syria. Ministers have been concerned for years about the performance of UN aid agencies. Four were stripped of funding in 2011, and a government review of aid spending last year was critical of the UN agency Unesco. The agency was found to be inefficient and unaccountable and was rated as ‘weak’ for the way it controlled costs and dealt with fraud.

In a separate intervention in New York, the international development secretary Priti Patel said the UN had ‘ballooned into a multiplicity of agencies and organisations, with too little coherence’.

Mrs May warned world leaders that the international system would not survive if countries continued to flout rules and treaties to suit themselves.

In a coded attack on Mr Trump, Mrs May bracketed the breaking of the Paris climate change deal with North Korea’s flouting of treaties designed to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons.