The Prime Minister has identified the top three priorities for institutional reform:

• Reforming international institutions, and particularly the World Bank, to be capable of tackling climate change and global poverty.
• Re-examining the roles of the IMF and World Bank to find news ways to handle global financial turbulence and to bring prosperity to more than just a fortunate few.
• Reforming international institutions to more effectively counter terrorism, the spread of conflict, and state failure; while ensuring energy and capacity remains to not just tackle crises but stabilise post-conflict too.
  

In respect of the United Nations we have two urgent priorities for reform:

• Reforming the Security Council to bring in Brazil, Germany, India, Japan plus Africa. We support a permanent reform and if needed to break the deadlock, an intermediate solution to give the Council greater global representivity, and consolidate its primacy as the authoritative body on maintaining international peace and security.
• Reforming and bringing coherence to the UN's work on post-conflict stabilisation and recovery. In particular we need more integrated international efforts; more effective funding in the early recovery/stabilisation period; and more rapidly deployable civilian capacities.

We also remain deeply committed to Delivering System Wide Coherence across the UN, building on the 2006 High-Level Panel report, "Delivering as One". We need to ensure the growth in UN development, humanitarian and environment systems, is  matched by the coherency which allows them to be effective and efficient, and to deliver results.

We also support ongoing efforts to modernise the management of the UN secretariat. In particular we see Human resource management and budgetary reform as priorities.

On 27 August 2008, the UN Security Council (UNSC) debated UNSC working methods.  Further to this, on 2 September 2008, the UK's Permanent Representative delivered a statement at the meeting of the Open-Ended Working Group on the question of equitable representation and increase in membership of the Security Council.