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What were the key outcomes and demographics of the NatWest Hardship Grant Programme delivered through Responsible Finance and CDFIs in 2023?
A total of £416,000 was dispersed by six CDFIs through the NatWest Hardship Grant Programme in 2023, with an average grant size of just £102 — helping around 4,000 families in acute financial difficulty. Of those recipients, 62% were women, 66% were aged between 25 and 44, and the vast majority were in employment, exposing how sharply the cost of living crisis cut into working households.
A £102 average grant — and the difference it made to real lives
The scale of individual grants may look small on paper, but the impact reported by recipients tells a different story. The programme, funded through NatWest's broader cost of living support package — of which £900,000 was allocated to Responsible Finance — was designed precisely for people who had fallen into acute hardship and had nowhere else to turn.
Concrete examples from the programme are stark: an NHS worker who needed to buy a tyre to get to work, and individuals clearing council tax arrears to avoid turning to illegal money lenders. These are not cases of chronic financial exclusion — they are working people hit by a single, specific crisis. As discussed in The Responsible Finance Podcast, recipients described the grants as a lifeline.
The decision to channel support through CDFIs rather than directly was deliberate. CDFIs already had established relationships with vulnerable communities and the operational infrastructure to reach people mainstream banks simply cannot. This is a point developed at length in this episode with Brian Holland and Stuart Foster.
Working-age, employed, and still unable to make ends meet
The demographic data challenges a common misconception about who experiences financial hardship. Two-thirds of grant recipients were aged 25 to 44 — prime working age. The majority were in employment. These are not people outside the labour market; they are people whose wages simply did not stretch far enough during a period of steep inflation and rising living costs.
The gender split is equally striking: 62% of recipients were women. This aligns with broader evidence that women bear a disproportionate share of household financial pressures, particularly in lower-income working families. Holland addressed this directly in the episode, framing the programme's demographic findings as evidence of how structural vulnerability intersects with day-to-day financial fragility.
"CDFIs provide a terrific part of the overall ecosystem of financial services — for those who are not able to borrow from the mainstream banks, CDFIs do a brilliant job filling that gap."
Brian Holland — Director, Customer Vulnerability, Retail Controls and Remediation, NatWest Group.
Holland has been with NatWest for 14 years. He leads the bank's approach to vulnerable customers across all divisions, overseeing consumer duty compliance, retail bank risk and control, and remediation when the bank needs to make things right for customers. He co-authored — alongside Stuart Foster, Managing Director of Financial Institutions at NatWest — the joint foreword to Responsible Finance's 2023 impact report, published in May 2024 at an event hosted by NatWest. Foster, who has been with the bank for 24 years, served on the Better Society Capital board for 6.5 years and brings deep institutional knowledge of the community finance ecosystem.
NatWest's total cost of living support package was approximately £10 million. The Hardship Grant Programme represented a focused slice of that — targeted, community-routed, and measurable. The six CDFIs involved were able to deploy the funding quickly and track outcomes at the individual level, providing the demographic granularity that Holland and Foster discuss in the full episode on Listenly.
See also
Why did NatWest choose to partner with CDFIs as part of its cost of living support package in 2022–2023?
NatWest used its data from banking across the UK to anticipate the impact of rising interest rates and inflation on consumers — which led the bank to direct part of its cost of living support package toward CDFIs as trusted, community-level partners able to reach those most at risk.
How long has NatWest Group been working with Community Development Finance Institutions (CDFIs) and what does that history involve?
NatWest has been active in the community finance sector since the mid-1990s — over 30 years of involvement. The bank was a founding funder of the sector and has maintained a continuous relationship through investment, technical assistance and co-authoring sector impact reports.
What is Kate Pender's view on why mainstream financial institutions avoid lending to financially vulnerable customers, and what needs to change?
Kate Pender argues that when providers assess the risks of serving a very different group of customers, it is "just too hard" — and that systemic change in risk appetite and regulation is required to shift that calculus for the sector at large.
Key takeaways
- Six CDFIs dispersed £416,000 in hardship grants in 2023, with an average grant of just £102 reaching approximately 4,000 families.
- Most recipients were employed — the programme exposed how the cost of living crisis hit working households, not only those outside the labour market.
- 62% of recipients were women and 66% were aged 25–44, revealing clear demographic patterns in acute financial vulnerability.
- Individual grants prevented outcomes as serious as reliance on illegal money lenders, illustrating that small sums at the right moment can avert much larger crises.
Brian Holland and Stuart Foster go further on NatWest's three-decade relationship with the CDFI sector, the policy levers that could unlock more investment, and what a record year of lending means for community finance.
Listen to the episode on Listenly