UK National Wealth Fund commits up to GBP 36.6bn term loan to Sizewell C nuclear plant

Mechanism

The National Wealth Fund — the UK's state investment bank, formed from the merger of the UK Infrastructure Bank's mandate with a new GBP 27.8bn capital injection announced in the 2024 Autumn Budget — committed a term loan facility of up to GBP 36.6 billion to finance construction of the Sizewell C twin-EPR nuclear power station (3.2GW combined capacity) on the Suffolk coast. The facility is the single largest disclosed commitment the NWF has made to date and forms the majority of Sizewell C's construction-phase debt funding.

It sits alongside (not in place of) a GBP 5bn loan tranche guaranteed by France's Bpifrance Assurance Export and arranged by a 13-bank pool — see [[2025-11-04-france-bpifrance-sizewell-c-loan-guarantee]], filed separately as it is a distinct issuer and instrument (French export-credit guarantee vs. direct UK state term loan) financing the same project. The UK government also holds an initial 44.9% equity stake in Sizewell C as its largest shareholder, alongside EDF, Centrica, Amber Infrastructure Group, and Canada's La Caisse.

The project is expected to generate enough electricity for approximately 6 million homes, create around 10,000 construction jobs at peak, direct an estimated GBP 4.4bn of spend to the east of England, and keep roughly 70% of total construction spend within the UK — framed by the government as central to Clean Power 2030 energy-security ambitions.

Downstream implications

• Establishes the National Wealth Fund's largest single commitment to date,

signalling the state investment bank's willingness to underwrite multi-decade, capital-intensive strategic infrastructure at a scale private lenders alone would not absorb.

• Alongside the Bpifrance guarantee, deepens Franco-British capital

interdependence in civil nuclear new-build — see sibling action [[2025-11-04-france-bpifrance-sizewell-c-loan-guarantee]] and the broader western-industrial-policy-stack theme (UK Wylfa SMR state aid, UKEF critical-goods guarantees) for the pattern of allied export-credit and state-investment-bank co-financing of energy-security infrastructure.

• A 44.9% direct government equity stake plus the majority of project debt

makes the UK exchequer's exposure to Sizewell C's cost and schedule risk (a live concern given UK nuclear new-build's history of overruns at Hinkley Point C) substantial and largely on-balance-sheet.

Open questions

• What is the term/tenor and effective interest rate on the NWF facility,

and how is drawdown phased against construction milestones?

• How does the NWF's GBP 36.6bn commitment interact with its overall

lending capacity envelope — does it crowd out capacity for other strategic-sector commitments (grid, gigafactories, CCUS) in the near term?

• What cost-overrun and schedule-delay allocation mechanism governs the

loan (e.g. contingency drawdown terms), given Hinkley Point C's precedent of multi-billion-pound overruns under a similar EDF-led delivery model?