The monarchy’s funding is public, published and widely misunderstood by people on both sides of the argument
Who Pays for the King? A Plain Guide to the Sovereign Grant
There are two things every person in Britain believes they know about royal money. The first is that the monarchy costs each of us about the price of a cup of coffee a year. The second is that it costs a scandalous fortune. Both are repeated with total confidence in pubs within sight of Buckingham Palace, often by the same person in the same evening. Neither quite survives contact with the accounts.
The accounts do exist. They are published every summer, they run to a great many pages, and I have read them so that you need not. What follows is an attempt to set out, as plainly as I can, how the working monarchy is paid for, what is and is not included, and where the honest disagreements lie.
The Old Bargain
The arrangement begins in 1760. George III, short of money, agreed to surrender the income from the Crown lands to Parliament in return for a fixed annual payment known as the Civil List. Every monarch since has renewed the deal at the start of the reign. The lands in question are now the Crown Estate, a vast property business that includes much of Regent Street, great tracts of farmland and, most valuably of late, the seabed around much of the coast.
The Crown Estate is not the private property of the King. He cannot sell it or spend its income. Nor is it government property in the ordinary sense. It belongs to the sovereign in right of the Crown, which is to say to the institution, and its profits go to the Treasury. This peculiar status is the root of most of the confusion.
How the Grant Is Calculated
Since 2012 the Civil List has been replaced by the Sovereign Grant. The grant is set as a percentage of the Crown Estate’s profits from two years earlier. It began at fifteen per cent. It was raised to twenty-five per cent for a period to pay for a ten-year programme of essential repairs at Buckingham Palace, where the wiring, pipes and boilers dated in places from the 1950s and were judged a serious fire and flood risk.
Then the Crown Estate’s profits jumped, thanks to the leasing of the seabed for offshore wind farms. Left alone, the formula would have delivered a windfall to the Palace. The percentage was therefore cut to twelve per cent. The grant has still risen in cash terms, a point critics make loudly, and the Treasury’s answer is that the reservicing work must be finished. Details of the framework are published on GOV.UK.
What the Grant Buys
The money pays for the official work of the monarchy: staff salaries, the upkeep of the occupied royal palaces, official travel, and the thousands of engagements, receptions and investitures carried out each year. The largest single item is property maintenance. The second is the payroll. The household employs several hundred people, from private secretaries to the staff who wind the clocks, of which there are a great many.
The annual report, available through the Royal Family’s website, lists travel that cost above a certain threshold. This is the page that journalists turn to first. A chartered flight or a journey on the royal train reliably produces a headline, and the Palace reliably replies that security and scheduling left no alternative.
What the Grant Leaves Out
Here the picture becomes less tidy. The Sovereign Grant does not include the cost of security, which is met by the police and other budgets and is not disclosed, on the reasonable ground that publishing it would help those it is meant to deter. Nor does it include the costs that fall on local councils and police forces when a royal visit comes to town.
Then there are the duchies. The Duchy of Lancaster is a separate landed estate whose income goes to the sovereign as the Privy Purse and is used for official and private expenditure. The Duchy of Cornwall does the same for the heir to the throne. Both are ancient, both are exempt from certain taxes that an ordinary company would pay, and both make voluntary tax payments on the income received. Campaigners for a republic argue that these estates are in truth public assets and that their revenues should be counted in the bill. Defenders reply that they are private estates of long standing.
The Coffee and the Fortune
So which pub theory is right? The price-of-a-coffee figure is produced by dividing the core Sovereign Grant by the population. It is accurate as far as it goes and it leaves out security and the duchies. The campaign group Republic publishes a much higher estimate that adds those items and others, including revenue it believes is forgone. That figure depends on assumptions the Palace rejects.
On the other side of the ledger, supporters point to tourism and to the value of the monarchy to British trade and diplomacy. Those benefits are real but very hard to measure, and nobody can say how many visitors would still come to photograph the palace gates if the occupant were a president. Versailles does a brisk trade without a king.
The Question of Consent
What strikes me, having spent a week with the figures, is how much heat is generated by so little reading. The accounts are audited by the National Audit Office and are examined from time to time by a committee of MPs, whose reports are on the UK Parliament website. They are imperfect and they are open. A citizen who wishes to be cross about royal spending can be cross with page references.
The deeper question is not one of accountancy. A hereditary head of state is either something a country wants or it is not. If it is wanted, the cost is modest by the standards of public spending. If it is not, no discount would make it a bargain. The sums are worth getting right, but they will not settle the argument.
Royal finances are an inexhaustible source of comedy, and my colleagues who produce British satirical news draw on them freely, as do the writers at The Daily Mash. Readers should keep the house guide on how to tell satire from real news to hand, because a true line from the royal accounts can sound more far-fetched than the jokes. The essay on what satirical commentary is, and what it is not is also worth ten minutes. My reporting on the Crown is collected on my author page at The London Prat.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
