Royalty payments
Sovereign Grant , Issue 1676

A LAST-MINUTE appeal by the Palace spared Brian from announcing his own pay packet in the King's Speech. Instead, news that the Sovereign Grant was to be reviewed (and possibly cut) was buried on p101 of the explanatory notes.

The grant replaced the civil list in 2012 after the Palace found a pliable chancellor in George Osborne. Until then, MPs had regular debates about the civil list, many taking the chance to snipe about lavish royal lifestyles.

The 2012 grant pegged the royal pay packet at 15 percent of the profits of the Crown Estate, with five-yearly reviews undertaken by the three royal trustees (the PM, chancellor and monarch's treasurer) and no need for MPs to get involved.

Wretched ratchet
The Palace was delighted, especially as few noticed the "golden ratchet" which meant the monarch's income could never decrease even if Crown Estate profits dipped. And no one foresaw that profits would actually shoot up.

The amount paid to the household soared from £31m to £42.8m in the first five years and is £137.9m this year. With the cost of living crisis there is pressure for this to be significantly cut.

That current figure is inflated because Theresa May muddied the waters in 2017 by agreeing to fund the whole £369m cost of refurbishing Buck House – something previous PMs had declined to do – by increasing the grant level to 25 percent for ten years. Politicians had little opportunity to debate the move and weren't told that options of using sponsorship or private finance instead had been vetoed by the Palace.

The grant soared further after the auction of offshore wind farm licences, as the Crown Estate owns most of the country's sea beds.

Feeding formula
Negotiating a new funding formula will be bruising. Legislation is necessary and MPs are less deferential since Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor's dramatic humiliations.

The Palace, outwardly helpful, is already scrapping for as much as it can get. It also wants the government to move fast – to get away with as little parliamentary scrutiny as possible and bag a deal before Labour takes a likely left turn.

William at least has read the writing on the wall and is selling 20 percent of his Duchy of Cornwall to invest £500m on eradicating homelessness and funding eco-projects. And the normally hyper-secretive heir has also broken with tradition to reveal he pays rent of £307,500 a year on his new home in Windsor Great Park. But then he can afford to, from an annual income of £23m.

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PERSISTENT FLOATER
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