How ethical is Barclays?
Our research highlights several ethical issues with Barclays, including its approach to climate change, tax conduct, lending policies, loans and investments, and being the target of a boycott call over its links to companies supplying weapons to Israel.
Below we outline some of these issues. To see the full detailed stories, and Barclay's overall ethical rating, please sign in or subscribe.
Financing fossil fuels
Barclays is the largest European financier of fossil fuels, and the ninth largest worldwide. The bank was featured in the Banking on Climate Chaos report – a collaboration between multiple environmental groups – which stated that Barclays had provided over $24 billion in fossil fuel financing in 2024.
The research and campaign organisation Reclaim Finance says: "What is striking about Barclays’ oil and gas policy is the number of references to oil and gas expansion, and the absence of firm measures to cease funding it."
While Barclays does have some exclusion policies related to financing fossil fuels, saying for example that it won’t finance “Energy Groups for expansion projects", it still allows financing for new fossil fuel projects.
Barclays also doesn’t have adequate carbon emissions reduction targets for its scope 3 emissions – the main source of its carbon emissions.
Financing arms companies supplying Israel
In June 2024, the campaign groups Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), Campaign Against the Arms Trade, and War on Want published a report documenting Barclays' "Bankrolling [of] genocide and apartheid". The report, published in May 2024, stated that Barclays had increased its investment in companies supplying arms to Israel by 55% since 2021, and that it owned shares worth over £2bn (with a further £6.1 billion in loans and underwriting) to nine companies supplying weapons and military technology to Israel.
Barclays faced a boycott call from PSC, and sustained direct action against its branches by campaign group Palestine Action.
Barclays released a statement on defence funding, saying: "We have been asked why we invest in nine defence companies supplying Israel, but this mistakes what we do. We trade in shares of listed companies in response to client instruction or demand and that may result in us holding shares."
The bank’s latest 2024 financial reports show no investment in Elbit Systems. PSC and Palestine Action claim this shows their efforts are having an impact, and celebrated it as a campaign victory in October 2024. It showed a drop from $3,400,000 of shares in Elbit held by the bank in May 2024.
However, PSC continues to call for a boycott of Barclays until it divests from all other complicit arms companies. These include BAE Systems, Boeing, Caterpillar and QinetiQ. The campaign group has also called for Barclays to make a public statement confirming that it has officially severed ties with Elbit.
Tax havens and lobbying
Barclays has subsidiaries in lots of tax havens including Hong Kong, Isle of Man, Jersey, Guernsey, and Switzerland. In 2021 the EU Tax Observatory, a research institute dedicated to tax evasion, published a report which analysed banks’ country-by-country reporting of tax and profits for the years 2014 to 2020.
The Guardian reported that leading European banks are "booking around €20bn (£17bn) a year – equivalent to 14% of their total profits – in tax havens, with Barclays, HSBC and NatWest Group among those enjoying the lowest tax rates”.
A spokesperson for Barclays told the Guardian that the bank was the fifth-largest UK taxpayer and paid taxes across the jurisdictions in which it operated.
Barclays is a Living Wage certified employer, which is considered positive, however its highest paid director received £10,533,000 in 2024, meaning that Ethical Consumer marked Barclays down for excessive director pay.
The text above was written in April 2025, and most research was conducted in February 2025.
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