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Let's be friendsAs part of the Ditch Dirty Development campaign, People & Planet, along with partner organisations PLATFORM, World Development Movement, NUS and others, have been directly engaging with RBS-NatWest to raise key campaign issues. Details of this engagement including meetings and letters will be published here (most recent at the top of the page).
Meetings with RBS-NatWest
29 April 2010: Meeting with Sir Philip Hampton, RBS Group Chairman, following RBS 2010 AGM and Week of Action
People & Planet’s Director Ian Leggett, along with campaign partners from WDM, PLATFORM, Friends of the Earth Scotland and the Indigenous Environmental Network, met with senior RBS executives the day after its 2010 Annual General Meeting to challenge RBS’ investments in controversial projects such as tar sands.
P&P and WDM activists staged a week of action to highlight RBS involvement in backing dirty tar sands companies
The meeting fell in the middle of our week of action to clean up RBS, including an alternative public AGM alongside RBS’ closed-door AGM yesterday. This meeting represented a significant concession on the part of RBS which has previously resisted our’ requests for high level meetings.
People & Planet, along with partners PLATFORM and World Development Movement, has been putting pressure on RBS to publicly commit to stop financing companies that are exacerbating climate change or developing projects without the free, prior and informed consent of indigenous communities.
Eriel Deranger, an indigenous Canadian activist with the Rainforest Action Network, said:
“I was shocked to hear the Chairman state that RBS involvements in tar sands were seen to be so minute, that they hardly knew what the tar sands actually are. Eight billion dollars loaned to companies involved in tar sands extraction is hardly minute. Our local communities are feeling the devastating impacts of tar sands each and every day.”
Speaking after the meeting, P&P’s Director, Ian Leggett, said:
“RBS still has its head in the sand about its role as the UK bank that is the principal backer of fossil fuels exploitation. There are no signs that they are willing to commit to phase out their financing of tar sands, coal or other dirty fuels. It is exactly the same sort of behaviour - high risk, irresponsible investments offering a quick profit to boost bonuses - that led to the financial crisis. If RBS is serious about wanting to be a world leader in low carbon financing, it urgently needs to take some clear decisions to put words into practice.
Deborah Doane, Director of the World Development Movement, said:
“We welcome RBS’ commitment to take our issues to board level discussion; however talk alone is not enough. We remain sceptical that this will lead to changes in RBS’ practises relating to lending in projects such as tar sands or Vedanta. The Chair explicitly denied any significant responsibility on the part of individual banks towards the harmful impacts of such investments. Nonetheless, we hope the board collectively will take a different view.”
The campaign groups involved made it very clear that they will continue the campaign to ensure that RBS is not using taxpayers’ money to continue to trample on the environment and human rights.
Read our joint letter to RBS following the meeting with Sir Philip Hampton on 29 April 2010
Read RBS’ latest response
20 August 2008: Meeting between representatives of People & Planet, RBS Corporate Responsibility Team, PLATFORM and NUS.
What RBS-Natwest must do to Ditch Dirty Development:
RBS-NatWest must adopt and implements a policy to switch funding from fossil fuel projects to renewable energy. This policy must commit RBS-NatWest to:
Calculate and publish the embedded emissions resulting from loans to oil, gas and coal projects
Cap embedded emissions and set annual targets for reductions
Commit to an irreversible transition from fossil fuel to renewable energy lending
Establish ‘no-go’ areas for lending: immediately halt loans to unconventional fossil fuels (eg tar sands) and which affect sensitive ecosystems such as rainforests. Funding for new unabated coal power generation in the global North should also immediately be stopped.
This meeting was the first time People & Planet, PLATFORM and NUS were able to put the campaign demands (see box) directly to the Corporate Responsibility Team of the RBS Group.
Read a summary of key points here, download the full minutes, and then why not do some engagement of your own? Email RBS to let them know what you think of their response to the campaign so far.
Summary:
Overall, while the meeting was positive in terms of direct communication with RBS staff, there was no indication that the key demands of the Ditch Dirty Development campaign are being met by RBS. There was no agreement over the term ‘embedded emissions’, nor that RBS would monitor and report on these, and the discussion did not even get to the central campaign aim that RBS should commit to reducing these emissions.
In terms of a transition of investments to renewable energy, it is clear that RBS has made commitments to fund renewables, but without reducing funding for fossil fuels, this will not result in the transition needed to avoid dangerous climate change. In the meeting, there was no suggestion that RBS would reduce investments in fossil fuels, rather the opposite, as RBS made arguments to justify continued investments (eg the argument that we need to ‘keep the lights on’).
On no-go areas, such as tar sands and unabated coal power, there was no indication that RBS was intending to make public its internal guidance, nor that this guidance covered the areas outlined by the campaign as of particular concern for climate change.
Further Key points arising from the meeting:
RBS didn’t accept the term ‘embedded emissions’, nor did they make any commitments or indication of intending to reduce these.
RBS maintained that it is categorically not an option to report on individual projects’ carbon emissions in their corporate responsibility reporting.
RBS highlighted the fact that there is no agreed methodology for calculating embedded emissions, and identified some difficulties in terms of how to allocate responsibility for emissions. We pointed out that the lack of a standard methodology should not mean that no action is taken, rather that RBS should aim to lead in developing a robust methodology for the whole sector.
RBS said they are involved in debates in the sector on how the banking industry engages with the issue of climate change. We believe that such debates are a potential way to move the whole sector forward and urged RBS to take a leading role in pushing for sector-wide action to monitor, report on and reduce emissions resulting from lending.
RBS said they are a large bank and therefore have a significant energy financing portfolio. They pointed out that they are also a leading financier of renewable energy. The RBS Chairman announced the company’s aim to be number one in renewable energy financing at the low carbon summit that RBS held with Government in June 2008.
However, RBS also claimed that there are not enough renewable projects for them to fund, pointed out the challenge faced by the Government in terms of ‘keeping the lights on’ and argued that to achieve transition it was essential to invest in new technologies such as carbon capture.
Asked whether RBS would rule out certain projects on the basis of moral, social or environmental principles, RBS said it had internal policy guidance and risk assessment procedures, but could not tell us about these in detail.
RBS informed us of their new environment programme, which has four areas: i) the environmental footprint of RBS (meaning their direct, rather than embedded emissions); ii) employee engagement (eg encouraging employees to reduce their own carbon footprints); iii) product and service innovation (eg ‘green mortgages’); iv) environmental risk (this area includes financing and reputational risks).
RBS says it cannot get ahead of Government policy or investor sentiment in terms of action on climate change.
Download the full minutes of the meeting. These minutes have been agreed by everyone who was at the meeting.
The Corporate Responsibility Team at RBS have said that they are happy to receive and respond to emails on these issues. Tell them what you think of the bank’s progress so far using this email box.
This action is no longer active.
When the action was active, this was our suggested text.
RBS and climate change
Please write your own message to the RBS Corporate Responsibility Team here. Referring to the minutes of the meeting might be a good idea, as these minutes are an agreed record of what was said.
Letters to RBS-NatWest
14 May 2010
Joint letter to RBS following the meeting with Sir Philip Hampton on 29 April 2010
18 December 2007
Letter from People & Planet and PLATFORM to Sir Tom McKillop, Chairman of RBS Group
13 December 2007
Letter from NUS to Sir Tom McKillop, Chairman of RBS Group
