NatWest has been slammed for investing at least £17 million in the UK’s biggest supplier of coal to the cement industry, despite pressure on banks to stop financing fossil fuels.
According to documents seen by DeSmog, the bank ploughed money into Hatfield Energy, which imported at least 350,000 tonnes of coal in 2025.
Experts and activists have accused NatWest of undermining its own climate targets by supporting coal use.
In 2020, the year that NatWest was the exclusive banking sponsor of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, it drew up a climate transition plan that it claimed would limit its financing of fossil fuels.
The bank pledged to no longer lend to and underwrite companies “with more than 15 percent of activities related to thermal and lignite coal” unless those companies had climate transition plans in place by the end of 2021 that aligned with the 2015 Paris Agreement.
