Human rights statement

Nationwide holds a unique position in the UK financial services sector. As the largest building society, we can deliver banking products and services, as well as mutual good, to our customers in a way banks are unable to. We are owned by our members. Members are our customers who have a current account, mortgage or savings account with us. We aim to return additional value to our members as our owners. We deliver banking products and services to them to help them manage their everyday finances, own a home, and save for the future. We also support landlords and those who rely on the private rented sector for their long-term housing needs through our buy-to-let business, The Mortgage Works.

Our strategy is centred around our purpose: ‘Banking – but fairer, more rewarding, and for the good of society.’ This states our ambition to make a positive difference for our members, customers, communities and society as a whole.

We believe in doing business in a way that promotes and respects the human rights of everyone who is impacted by Nationwide. We are committed to building positive relationships with all our stakeholders.

Through our policies and processes we seek to make a positive impact on our range of stakeholders. They are also designed to protect the dignity and interests of our stakeholders. In addition, we address and reduce, where possible, any potential negative impacts that our business might have on those around us.

Nationwide’s respect for human rights is aligned with the United Nations (UN) Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, and those codified in international law through the International Bill of Human Rights. This consists of the: 

• Universal Declaration of Human Rights (opens in a new window)
• International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (opens in a new window)
• International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (opens in a new window)
• International Labour Organization (ILO) Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work (opens in a new window)

As a signatory to the UN Global Compact, we are also aligned to its standards, including those around human rights and labour rights. We are also a signatory to the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP FI) Principles for Responsible Banking. We have committed to a strategic alignment with the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement and to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Our Mutual Good Commitments demonstrate how our business aligns to and supports these goals. More information on our Mutual Good Commitments can be found in our Annual Report and Accounts.

Our participation in the UN Global Compact’s Business and Human Rights Accelerator programme in 2023 has increased our understanding of best practice when conducting our due diligence with respect to human rights. Our participation also improved our ability to identify and manage important human rights risks.

In accordance with the Modern Slavery Act 2015, we publish our annual Modern Slavery Act Statement on our website. This outlines the steps we take to mitigate the risk of slavery or human trafficking taking place across our business, operations, and supply chain.

Nationwide exists to help customers manage their everyday finances, save for the future, and own a home. These are human rights that afford people dignity, security, equality, and inclusion. We recognise our responsibility in helping to reduce some of the risks and challenges that might prevent equal access to these rights.

We want to support and protect our customers’ financial wellbeing by helping to build their financial resilience. We do this by:

• increasing our customers’ confidence with money.
• helping to build protection from economic crime.
• providing specialist support for customers in vulnerable circumstances when they need us most.

We have a variety of initiatives to support our ambitions. These include financial health checks in branches, savings tools, and financial and digital education.

We want to help protect our customers by:

• understanding and responding to vulnerable customer needs.
• finding different ways to help customers with their financial difficulties.
• applying an ethic of care, inclusion, and accessibility, to shape everything we do, from our branches to our corporate governance, from product design to marketing.
• recognising the financial and social benefits of owning a home, and helping to overcome the barriers many people experience in buying, maintaining, and retaining a home.
• engaging with a range of policymakers across the political spectrum to champion the needs and interests of our customers.

We’re also helping to address housing needs through:

• charitable partnerships and donations.
• lending to providers of social housing.
• our social investment and Community Grants, which are designed to help the most vulnerable in our society find a place fit to call home.

We continue to work to protect our customers from becoming the victims of crime, and to prevent Nationwide from being used to facilitate criminal activity, including economic crime. Strong governance, culture, policies, and defence systems, coupled with training, heightened awareness, and human interventions, all play their part in helping us protect our customers.

We focus on:

• ensuring our customers can transact safely, protecting customers from fraud and scams.
• using policies, procedures, and regular training to help us operate with integrity, defend against economic crime and protect society.
• keeping customers’ money and personal data safe and secure by  managing cyber risks.
• respecting and protecting our customers’ data, ensuring privacy.
• providing a range of ways customers can raise a concern.

Modern slavery and human trafficking is a crime. Financial institutions are able to use their systems and controls to minimise the risks to customers. Nationwide is committed to fighting modern slavery throughout our retail business, our operations and our supply chain. Our anti-slavery approach has three focus areas:

• detect and disrupt
• raise awareness
• support victim-survivors

We mitigate and manage the risk of modern slavery through a range of controls and due diligence processes. These include:

• training colleagues across our organisation.
• partnering with survivor charities to support victims in regaining financial independence.
• establishing a cross-business working group to co-ordinate initiatives, insights and learnings.

In addition, we work with modern slavery charities to build our own knowledge and understanding on how we can best respond to the needs of vulnerable customers.

Our Modern Slavery Act Statement outlines what we are doing to help fight modern slavery.

We want to be a great place to work. We provide our colleagues with a safe and healthy work environment that is flexible to their needs. This includes ensuring our colleagues have a voice and the confidence to bring their whole selves to work.

Find out about how:

• we listen to our colleagues.
• we’re protecting the health and safety of colleagues at work.
• we’re ensuring colleagues have the right skills now and for the future.
• we’re investing in the development of our leaders.

Our colleagues are encouraged to bring out the best in each other, to create a place where differences are valued. We continue to support our colleagues with their social, mental, physical, and financial wellbeing. Together, we strive to have a meaningful impact on customers, communities, and society. Some of the ways we do this are through:

• our parental leave, flexible working packages (opens in a new window) and hybrid working policies that help to ensure our colleagues are not unfairly disadvantaged by personal characteristics, family or caring circumstances.
• recognising inclusion and wellbeing as central to our colleagues’ ability to thrive.
• our employee network groups where our people can share their thoughts and experiences, learn from others, and influence change.
• supporting our colleagues’ right to freedom of association and collective bargaining.

We carry out regular pay monitoring and test our approach through periodic equal pay audits. These make sure our policies are operating fairly and without bias. We also publish our gender and ethnicity pay gaps annually.

Our culture at Nationwide is built on a strong ethic of care that treats our people with dignity and respect.

For us this involves:

• rewarding people fairly and creating a climate that enables people to perform better.
• balancing commerciality with our values and ethic of care so that, as we transform our organisation, our people still feel supported.
• protecting and promoting our colleagues’ right to decent work.

Our labour rights standard provides further detail on our commitment to protect and promote labour rights.

Our code of conduct supports our commitment to promote a culture of honesty and integrity across Nationwide, enabling our people to do the right thing for our customers. We continually listen to our colleagues by providing regular opportunities for them to share their views including through our culture and engagement surveys.

This frequent insight into our colleagues’ experience means we can respond with agility and pace to support where and when it is needed. We gather insights through our employee network groups, engagement with Nationwide Group Staff Union (NGSU) and Employee Connect. We also hold question and answer sessions with our Executive Committee and Non-Executive Directors.

We do everything we can to create an environment where colleagues feel safe to speak up, and feel confident that when they do, any concerns of wrongdoing, misconduct, or behaviours will be listened to, and acted upon. Likewise, we have policies and processes in place to respond to identified cases of discrimination, abuse or harassment. We provide several ways to 'Speak Up' at Nationwide, including, but not limited to, our whistleblowing process.

The fundamental ways in which Nationwide operates, from our social investments, to our charity partnerships and our relationship with the environment, all leave their mark on the ability of our communities to thrive. Thriving communities offer secure homes, reliable access to finances, a good standard of education and learning, and positive job and career prospects. As a mutual, we seek to make a positive difference for our customers, communities and society as a whole. We commit at least 1% of our pre-tax profits each year to charitable activities, largely focused on housing. We also seek to use our voice to drive positive change, using our size, influence and values to work for the good of society.

We’re also taking a bolder stand to help influence policymakers on issues that matter to our customers. This includes making representations to the government and politicians to champion the interests of our customers and Nationwide. We’re also engaged through our trade association memberships, including UK Finance and the Building Societies Association.

As a mutual, and a member of the Financing a Just Transition Alliance, we believe in supporting a just transition. This would ensure that as we transition to a net zero economy the most vulnerable in society are not disadvantaged.

Our Climate-related Financial Disclosures 2023 describe our understanding of the impact of climate change on Nationwide and our customers. It outlines the actions we are taking to understand and manage climate-related risk. 

Read more on our efforts to reduce environmental harm.

We recognise that we are facing a critical moment for climate change and continue to work towards a net zero future. Our business model means that our strategy does not involve lending to or investing in businesses that have a negative impact on the environment, such as those in the fossil fuel industry.

In 2020, we committed to holding a minimum amount of environmental, social and governance (ESG) bonds within our treasury portfolio. We define ESG bonds as those issued by multilateral development banks or by trusted bodies. From April 2020 to April 2023 we committed to treble our ESG holdings from £500 million to £1.5 billion. We met this target, as reported in our annual report and accounts 2023. We will maintain a minimum holding of £1.5 billion for the financial year 2023/24.

Read about our approach in our Responsible investment statement.

It is important that our suppliers represent Nationwide and demonstrate a commitment to our policies and standards. Nationwide’s Third Party Code of Practice - PDF 1,019KB (opens in a new window) defines our expectations to respect the values and human rights of their employees, to never use child, forced, or involuntary labour, and to ensure working hours are within local regulations and industry practices. Their employees must be free to join, or decide not to join, worker organisations, and must be provided with clear disciplinary and grievance procedures.

At onboarding, all prospective suppliers are asked to agree to comply with our Third Party Code of Practice - PDF 1,019 KB (opens in a new window). They are also asked if they have produced a compliant statement under the UK Modern Slavery Act. If either of the questions are answered negatively, we investigate and seek to create a plan to close any gaps before the supplier can work with us on an ongoing basis. Only where certain circumstances apply will a dispensation be granted by our senior procurement team.

Since 2021, Nationwide has partnered with sustainability ratings provider EcoVadis, to help us monitor our suppliers’ performance across environment, labour, human rights, ethics, and sustainable procurement activities. Third parties are asked to complete the assessment on an annual basis. If their overall score does not meet the threshold that would suggest they are engaged in sustainability, Nationwide requires a corrective action plan and improvement within 12 months.

To learn about how we responsibly and ethically select and manage our third parties, while supporting their needs and interests, visit our page on procurement for mutual good.

Our Responsible Business Committee, chaired by the Director of Strategy, Performance and Sustainability and attended by senior representatives from across the business, provides oversight for the development of Nationwide’s Statement on Human Rights, on an annual basis.

We use research, policies, risk assessments, and other strategies and initiatives to support and protect the human rights of our customers, colleagues, third parties and communities. The governance structures that manage and oversee these, each feed into their relevant Executive and Board sub-committees and into meetings of the Executive Committee.

Our Statement on Human Rights is supported by our policies and processes which help us to identify human rights coverage and any associated risks and gaps.

These include our:

• Anti-slavery standard and guidance
• Inclusion and diversity policy
• Fair treatment at work policy
• Family friendly policies (which include, becoming a parent, flexible working, and time off policies)
• Disciplinary policy and our resolution framework (which covers grievance, harassment and bullying policies)
• Health, safety, environmental and wellbeing policies
• Healthcare and protection benefits policy
• Hybrid working policy (how we work together)
• Job security and redundancy policy
• Payments and working arrangement policies
• Pensions policy
• Rewards policy
• Third party code of practice
• Whistleblowing policy
• Labour rights standard

These include our:

• Financial crime prevention policy
• Anti-corruption policy
• Fraud policy

These include our:

• Anti-bribery and corruption policy
• Data privacy policy
• Gifts and hospitality policy
• Internal fraud policy
• Market abuse policy
• Privacy and monitoring policy
• Regulatory conduct and responsibilities
• Tax policy
• Code of conduct policy
• Conflicts of interest policy
• Modern slavery statement

These include our:

• Retail product lifecycle policy
• Technology policy
• Brand, member and colleague communications policy

Last updated September 2023