Prince of prof ligacy
Charles runs up £1MILLION bill jetting around world – while other royals manage to fly on the cheap
PRINCE Charles may be known as a stickler for doing things his way, but even by those high standards his £1million travel bill last year looks extravagant.
Buckingham Palace accounts reveal today that among the bills picked up by the taxpayer was a £362,000 tab for him and his wife Camilla to charter an RAF plane to visit the Far East.
But the eye-watering cost also reveals a profligate side to the prince – it was almost four times what the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge spent on a similar visit the year before.
Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall took the converted Voyager A330 – nicknamed Cam Force One after former Prime Minister David Cameron, who sanctioned it – on a two-week tour of Singapore, Brunei, Malaysia and India last autumn. The cost to the public was £362,149, making it the single most expensive trip taken by a member of the Royal Family in the financial year 2017/18.
By contrast, the accounts reveal that when William and Kate went to India and Bhutan the previous year, they and their entourage flew by commercial airline at a cost of £35,372, then hired a private jet to travel inside the two countries for a further £62,331, totalling less than £100,000.
And in the same month as Charles and Camilla went to Brunei, his brother Prince Edward and his wife Sophie also flew there, by scheduled airline, at a cost of £21,534.
A Clarence House aide said: ‘I don’t think it’s about being grand, it’s about security, efficiency and value for money and delivering the programme.’
In all, £4.7million was spent on royal travel in 2017/18, a rise of £200,000 on the previous year. The most expensive form of royal travel, mile for mile, is the royal train which costs approximately £20,000 per journey. Charles took seven journeys on it, which has sumptuous sleeping and dining cars.
He also billed taxpayers £15,385 to charter a plane for a private day trip to London from Birkhall. Aides declined to explain the reason but admitted there was no official engagement, saying royals were ‘allowed to travel from residence to residence’.
The public paid £18,170 for Prince William to join the Passchendaele centenary commemoration in Belgium last July – and a further £30,414 to hire a separate private plane for Prince Charles to go too.
Aides said the two princes were travelling from different starting points in Britain and following different programmes in Belgium.
The rise in Charles’s travel bill is in part down to the fact that, as heir to the throne, he is undertaking more travel on behalf of the Queen, who has stepped down from foreign tours in view of her age.
The Prince of Wales derives most of his money from the Duchy of Cornwall, an estate of mainly farmland and residential property that was set up to provide a private income for the heir to the throne and his family. His income from the Duchy rose by 4.9 per cent to £21.7million last year, while he also got £1.2million from the Sovereign Grant from the Government. The prince paid £4.8million in tax, which he does voluntarily, a rise of 2 per cent on the previous year.
Accounts showed the Queen’s income also rose. Her finances come mainly from the Sovereign Grant, which last year rose from £42.8million to £45.7million, while her net expenditure rose to £47.4million, which a spokesman said represented a cost of 69p per man, woman and child in the UK.
Funding for William, Kate and Harry is listed under ‘Other Costs’, which soared from £3.5million to £5million. The accounts do not cover May’s royal wedding but do include the five-month period after Harry and Meghan announced their engagement in November.
The money for the younger royals comes from Charles’s private income. Royal aides refused to elaborate on their costs. One said: ‘There’s a level of privacy. We are happy to give the figure but we can’t go into more detail.’
‘I don’t think it’s about being grand’