Take it from me - save yourself a massive and prolonged headache and DO NOT BANK WITH NATWEST!!! Yes they may give have more branches than others but the people working in them are just sales assistants - they do not have any say in decision making process. Natwest are truely useless and do not know how to operate a bank or how to give even adequate customer service. They have many many subteams who seem incapable of communicating with each other.
I took out a graduate loan with Natwest in Oct 05 (which itself was a nightmare in itself as no one knew how to deal with graduate loans) and was surprised to see that they failed to set up the standing order so i could make repayments, and this took a large number of repeated calls from myself to get it set up. I was told no worries, the term of the loan would be extended. But oh no... 9 months later, after numerous threatening letters (all of which i have responded to and was told to ignore), i have now discovered that i am over the limit on the loan, they have no records of my previous calls and complaints, and now they have frozen all of my accounts, credit blacklisted me and keep telling my lies (such as 'no i can not give you our customer services phone number as its not to be given out to customers'!).

Save yourself the bother - the old-fashioned money under the matteress is a far better option. Infact, shooting yourself in the head would be less of an ordeal than banking with Natwest