NatWest to make huge change to millions of accounts TODAY – check if you're affected
We explain what to do if you're affected
BANK ON IT NatWest to make huge change to millions of accounts TODAY – check if you're affected
Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window)
Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
MILLIONS of NatWest customers will see a big change to accounts from today.
The move will hit savers trying to make a return on their hard-earned cash.
Sign up for Scottish Sun
newsletter
Sign up
1
NatWest is cutting rates hitting savers
Credit: Getty
The high street bank is chopping interest rates on a range of accounts from today.
It comes after the Bank of England (BoE) slashed the base rate from 4.5% to 4.25% earlier this month.
The base rate affects borrowing and saving rates offering by banks. Usually you will see rates come down if the central rate is lowered.
And now NatWest is today cutting interest rates on four of its savings accounts including its Digital Regular Saver, Flexible Saver and Help to Buy ISA.
The digital regular saver, flexible saver, savings builder and cash ISA are among other rates falling.
The interest earned depends on how much money you hold in these accounts, you can see the full list of how rates are changing in the table below.
Rates on three other savings accounts and a kids current account will be slashed from July 15.
NatWest customers with a children's First Saver account and a balance of more than £1 will see the interest rate fall from 2.25% to 2.05%.
If you've got a First Reserve account with £1 or more in the account, the interest rate will fall from 1.25% to 1.15%.
You can see the changes taking place on accounts in July in the table below.
A spokesperson for NatWest said: "Following the Bank of England base rate cut, we have made reductions to some of our variable rate savings accounts.
"We will communicate these changes to customers in due course, giving at least 14 days' notice of any changes.
"Details of these changes are available on our website now."
The provider is also cutting rates on variable rate mortgages.
NatWest has cut interest rates on accounts twice since the end of 2024.
In December, the bank dropped the interest rates on its Digital Regular Saver, Flexible Saver and Savings Builder accounts.
Then in March, it cut rates on 11 variable rate savings accounts including its Digital Regular Saver and Flexible Saver again.
It's not the only provider trimming returns for savers.
Nationwide is cutting interest rates on over 60 savings accounts from June 1 including a number of ISAs and easy access accounts.
And Virgin Money is trimming the rate on its M Plus Saver account next month.
What to do if your savings rate is being cut
If your interest rate drops, look to see if you can get a better return elsewhere.
Price comparison sites such as moneysavingexpert.com or moneyfactscompare.co.uk show the best savings accounts on the market.
Take action and move your money if you can get a more attractive return.
But do check whether the headline savings rate includes a bonus rate.
These bump up returns for a short period so you'll need to make a note to switch when those bonus rates fall off.
Others will only offer you a specific interest rate if you make a limited number of withdrawals each year.
Go over this withdrawal limit and the interest rate can plummet.
Some savings accounts offer additional perks which can make them attractive.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New Statesman
an hour ago
- New Statesman
Is Nigel Farage right about the Bank of England?
Photo byAfter Labour's fiscal shambles over the past week, it is depressing to see the only genuine economic radicalism in British politics emerging from the right. Reform deputy leader Richard Tice's recent claim that 'everything is up for debate' on the Bank of England once again shows why the party is setting the pace on national political discussion. It doesn't exactly hurt the party to have a strangely enamoured mainstream media, and an alternate news ecosystem around GB News that is mainlining its alt-right talking points. But Reform's willingness to seize the policy initiative shows that the party grasps the extent of Britain's economic dysfunction. From demanding the nationalisation of British Steel, to insisting taxpayers shouldn't foot the bill for quantitative easing (QE), Reform has been unafraid to challenge the orthodoxy. Its opponents urgently need to raise their game, or risk continuing to play catch up from now until the next election. The blunt truth is that the claims made for central bank independence were always overblown, and today, in a world of chaotic, repeated, overlapping crises, sacrosanct independence is a luxurious relic few countries can afford to maintain. The Bank of England's current mandate is not fit for purpose and in any case the Bank has operated well outside of it since the financial crisis. The arrival of so-called unconventional monetary policy in early 2009, in the form of QE, represented a major expansion of its powers. The Bank's balance sheet grew alongside its remit, with huge short-term impacts on wealth inequality (since shamefacedly admitted by the Bank) and with the longer-term costs to the Exchequer that Tice highlighted. There have been more graphic examples of over-reach: it wasn't 'markets' alone that removed Liz Truss as prime minister but the Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey's extraordinary intervention, in a press conference at the International Monetary Fund, that helped to stoke the market panic which forced her resignation in September 2022. 'Independence' for the Bank has turned, over the three decades since Gordon Brown granted it, into something dangerously close to 'dominance'. But killing this sacred cow will require a confrontation with the high priests of modern economics. Since the mid-1990s, the doctrine in mainstream Western economic thinking has been that central banks should be 'independent' of government, meaning that decisions over what has become the central economic management tool of interest rate-setting should be made by the banks without the broader, elected government involved. Central banks would be granted a simple mandate by their government to achieve a certain target for inflation, usually around 2 per cent, and expected to vary interest rates as they saw fit to achieve that. [See also: The QE theory of everything] The theory behind this was that if governments were left to set central bank interest rates themselves, they would game the system – cutting interest rates ahead of elections, for example, to stoke up the economy in the short run, at the risk of higher inflation. But knowing this, consumers, businesses and (crucially) those in financial markets would not believe governments when they also claimed to want to fight inflation. These promises would not be credible. Expectations of future inflation would be higher, and this would, in turn, feed back into actually higher inflation today. By breaking the link between elected governments and the central bank, independence was supposed to restore credibility to monetary policy. Sticking tightly to their mandate, ruled over by wise technocrats, independent central banks would act as credible guardians of price stability. Some costs were clear, even at the time. Excessively high interest rates maintained by the Bank of England following independence in 1997 were blamed, largely accurately, for further waves of deindustrialisation under New Labour. The pound was held at a value that made manufacturing exports uncompetitive: 1.5 million manufacturing jobs went, largely ignored at the time, between 1997 and 2009. Factory closures here may have appeared to be a price worth paying. Inflation remained low, interest rates manageable, real wages grew and a great expansion of consumer borrowing fuelled wider economic growth. The Bank of England governor at the time, Mervyn King, claimed to have midwifed the 'Nice' decade – Non-Inflationary, Continual Expansion. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe This was pure hubris. The arrival of central bank independence as a doctrine coincided with the extraordinary transformation of China, in particular, from one of the poorest countries on the planet to what is, by some measures, the world's largest economy. The relationship wasn't coincidental: the freeing up of global financial systems that 'independent' central banks were a component part of enabled the spread of consumer borrowing on a heroic scale throughout the Global North and this, in turn, helped lubricate the flow of cheap consumer products opened up by the mass industrialisation of East Asia. But what, plausibly, has more impact on consumer prices: a letter from Gordon Brown to the governor of the Bank of England, or 300 million Chinese moving from the countryside to work in factories? If you can buy a 50-inch flatscreen TV today for a fraction of its price even a few years ago, that isn't because the Bank's Monetary Policy Committee managed to keep voting the right way. It's the ending of this cheap flow that really heralds the end of the low-inflation decades. The halting of globalisation, rudely made permanent on Donald Trump's 2 April 'Liberation Day', and more fundamentally the conjoined crises of the climate and nature, all point towards a sharp and permanent reversal of those long decades of falling prices. Climate change means economic activity becomes harder and more costly. And today, it is rising food prices that have started to push up overall inflation in both the US and the UK. Staples like chocolate have soared in price in recent weeks, directly linked to adverse weather worsened by a changing climate. Conventional central bank policy is useless here. Putting up interest rates in London does not make more cocoa grow in drought-struck Ghana. If anything, by restricting future investment, it is likely to worsen this supply-side inflation over time. Nor do interest rates stop the new profiteers of shortage and disruption, like the fossil fuel companies and global agribusinesses, generating all time-record profits from this ecological cost-of-living crisis. This new high-inflation world is wreaking havoc with structures inherited from the old. Higher interest rates, and attempts by central banks to 'unwind' earlier QE, are now creating notional 'losses' on central bank balance sheets – losses that the Treasury has agreed to indemnify. Work by the New Economics Foundation suggests these now run to an extraordinary £130bn over the rest of the decade, after peaking at over £40bn last year. These are payments from the Treasury that go, via the Bank of England, to paying those commercial banks that hold accounts with it. It is these payments that Tice has targeted but which, to their credit, the Bank's former deputy governor for monetary policy Charles Bean and Gordon Brown have both flagged as an extraordinary indulgence in a time of austerity. 'Tiered reserves' – the Bank paying interest on only part of the accounts held – would be a smart, partial solution. The transformation has to go further. Dealing with a world of repeated price shocks and crises from non-monetary sources will require coordination between fiscal and monetary authorities. A very useful recent paper from LSE's Centre for Economic Transition Expertise calls for 'adaptive inflation targeting' from central banks, giving them greater flexibility and time to respond to climate and other shocks, while coordinating with the fiscal authorities. Strategic stocks of essential supplies, as called for by the economist Isabella Weber, and Swiss-style price controls (a quarter of consumer prices in Switzerland are regulated by the government) should all be part of the mix. Common-sense solutions remain anathema to the partisans of central bank 'independence', who tend to see any attempt at coordination between parts of government as clearing the route to the dreaded 'fiscal dominance' of monetary policy – an inflationary spiral of government deficits and money-printing. But the greater risk today is inaction in the name of orthodoxy, drifting further into instability and shortages with our most important economic institutions unable to cope. It shouldn't be left to Tice and Reform to make the case for radical change. [See also: Who's afraid of Gary Stevenson?] Related
Scottish Sun
14 hours ago
- Scottish Sun
Aldi announces massive change to its alcohol aisle in UK supermarket ‘first'
The budget retailer is the first supermarket in the UK to make the move BAR NONE Aldi announces massive change to its alcohol aisle in UK supermarket 'first' Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) BUDGET retailer Aldi has announced a massive change to its alcohol aisle in a UK supermarket "first." Aldi will change 20 million of its wine bottles becoming the first retailer to make the move. Sign up for Scottish Sun newsletter Sign up 1 The supermarket is the first in the UK to make the change Credit: Getty The collaboration project will see Aldi work with its wine suppliers and bottling partner Greencroft. New lighter wine bottles will be introduced as part of the retailers ongoing commitment to reducing unnecessary packaging. The new bottles will weigh in at a staggeringly low 300g. This takes the average weight across the range from 409g to just 371g. Additional bottles with reduced weights are expected to follow later in the year. Aldi will be the first UK supermarket to make the massive change. The new 300g bottles are now being used for popular lines such as Grapevine Sauvignon Blanc and Grapevine Merlot. The move is part of a broader initiative that has seen the supermarket reduce bottle weights since 2022. Aldi has said this has resulted in the removal of approximately 12.7 million empty bottles from circulation each year. Luke Emery, National Sustainability Director at Aldi UK, said: 'We're always looking for practical ways to reduce our environmental footprint while continuing to deliver the unbeatable quality and value our customers expect. Expert reveals the top everyday food pairings for bargain supermarket wine 'By working closely with our wine suppliers, we're introducing a simple yet impactful change that's already cutting down on materials and associated carbon. "It's one of the many steps we're taking as we continue to explore how we can continue to reduce bottle weights across our range and make our products more sustainable over time.' Aldi's new wine bottles will weigh a whopping 65 grams less than the standard 365 gram bottles. The retailer has said the roll out of the new bottles has already begun and will be completed by 2025. A statement on the Aldi website reads: "Who said that wine bottles must be made of glass, measuring 750 milliliters, and weighing 365 grams? "Following our mission to optimise packaging, we discovered new and creative ways to package the so-called drink of the gods. "All versions indicated a significant reduction in raw material use, as well as a decrease in carbon emissions - as they say, many roads lead to Rome."
Scottish Sun
15 hours ago
- Scottish Sun
Low income households to get £180 cost of living vouchers within days – check if you qualify
We reveal what other help you can if you're on a low income below FOOD BOOST Low income households to get £180 cost of living vouchers within days – check if you qualify Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) LOW income households are in line to receive cost of living vouchers worth up to £180 within days. The help comes via the Household Support Fund, a giant £742million pot of money that's been shared between councils in England. Sign up for Scottish Sun newsletter Sign up 1 A selection of British coins in an open hand. Credit: Getty Local authorities are distributing their share of the fund, which runs until March 2026, to households in need. In most cases, this is residents who are on benefits, low incomes or classed as vulnerable. Ealing Council, in London, has been given £4.7million out of the £742million pot and is issuing supermarket vouchers to families with children on benefits-related free school meals. Households with children under the age of five receiving housing benefit or council tax support are also eligible for vouchers. Vouchers are being issued in July, October and December this year, as well as February and March 2026. The vouchers being given to families with children on benefits-related free school meals in July are worth £90 per child, meaning households with two eligible children will receive £180. If you live in Ealing, you don't need to apply for the vouchers as they will be sent to you via email or letter. The council's partner, Blackhawk, is issuing a 16-digit, personalised code and instructions on how to redeem the vouchers on the Blackhawk website - If your child goes to a school outside the borough of Ealing, you will need to apply for the vouchers. Details on how to do that can be found via Three key benefits that YOU could be missing out on, and one even gives you a free TV Licence Can I get help if I live outside Ealing? Whether you can get help via the Household Support Fund depends on where you live. This is because each council sets it own eligibility criteria. However, the Household Support Fund, which was first established in 2021, is designed to help those on low incomes, benefits or classed as vulnerable. So, if you fit into any of these three categories, the chances are you will be eligible for support. The best thing to do is visit your local council's website where most have a page dedicated to the Household Support Fund. Or, you can contact your local council's customer service helpline to inquire. The latest round of Household Support Fund runs until March 31, 2026, and some councils have already opened up for applications. Households in Birmingham are being urged to apply for £200 payments. Meanwhile, low income households in North Northamptonshire can apply for supermarket vouchers worth up to £320. Other help if you're on a low income It's worth checking if you're eligible for benefits if you haven't already - it could boost your bank balance by thousands of pounds a year. Are you missing out on benefits? YOU can use a benefits calculator to help check that you are not missing out on money you are entitled to Charity Turn2Us' benefits calculator works out what you could get. Entitledto's free calculator determines whether you qualify for various benefits, tax credit and Universal Credit. and charity StepChange both have benefits tools powered by Entitledto's data. You can use Policy in Practice's calculator to determine which benefits you could receive and how much cash you'll have left over each month after paying for housing costs. Your exact entitlement will only be clear when you make a claim, but calculators can indicate what you might be eligible for. If you're struggling with the cost of food, check where your nearest food bank is, to help you get cupboard staples for less. The Trussell Trust has hundreds of food banks across the UK, and you can find your nearest one here - Meanwhile, if you have fallen behind on your energy bills, you might be able to get a grant to wipe any debt. British Gas and Octopus Energy, the UK's two biggest energy firms, both run schemes offering customers grants worth up to £2,000. You might be able to apply for a free grant through a local charity as well. Charity Turn2Us has a free-to-use grants search tool on its website which you can find here - Do you have a money problem that needs sorting? Get in touch by emailing money-sm@ Plus, you can join our Sun Money Chats and Tips Facebook group to share your tips and stories
