Charles must pay for Queen’s expenses
QUEEN Camilla will not be allowed an annual payment from Parliament – despite Prince Philip, her predecessor as consort, receiving £359,000 a year to fund his official duties.
A National Audit Office report into royal finances today discloses that Camilla will be denied the sort of separate Parliamentary annuity given to Philip.
Instead her activities will be met via the £86.3million annual taxpayer-funded Sovereign Grant paid to the King to cover his role as head of state and some of the official costs of those supporting him.
The report by the independent public spending watchdog sets out the facts and figures for how the Royal Family’s official work is publicly funded as part of its work to improve transparency.
It also disclosed that next year it will do a value for money audit into a £369million 10-year refurbishment of Buckingham Palace due to be completed in 2027.
A total of £185.1million has been spent on the reservicing programme so far, the report said, echoing figures which appeared in the Sovereign Grant annual accounts last month.
The Daily Express has found that a slimmed-down Royal Family undertook seven per cent fewer engagements in the first half of this year compared with the same period last year.
But the NAO report suggested the King might be busier than his late mother and that might affect the amount of money he needed.
“Each King and Queen has their own interests and priorities which affect their schedule of events,” it said. “Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II had cut back on events and travel in recent years, in part because of the global Covid-19 pandemic.
“It can be reasonably assumed that the King will be hosting more events and travelling to more engagements within the UK, and overseas at the request of the Government.”
But the NAO suggested there would be enough money from the Sovereign Grant to meet any extra costs. “These changes may affect spending profiles but would be within available funding from the grant,” it said.The report compared Camilla’s funding with that of her late father-in-law Philip, revealing: “Parliament provided Prince Philip with a separate annuity worth £359,000 per annum.
“Queen Camilla will not receive a separate annuity and the Queen’s activities will be funded from the grant.”
Philip, who retired in 2017 and died aged 99 in April 2021, continued to receive the sum each year.
This was despite Parliamentary annuities having been phased out for other family members and there was a change in the way the Royal Family received taxpayer support from 2012.
The old Civil List payments to the monarch were replaced by the Sovereign Grant, which still comes out of the general tax pot but is benchmarked to the equivalent of a percentage – currently 25 per cent – of the profits of the Crown Estate.
The Crown Estate is the independent property empire owned by the sovereign in name only that makes money for the Treasury.
In the year to March 2023, the Royal Household’s total expenditure was £117.3million – £107.5million of which came from public funds (the Sovereign Grant and the Reserve).
A review by Royal Trustees of how the Sovereign Grant is calculated is due to be published later this year and is expected to reduce the percentage in the funding formula.
New wind farm deals are set to give the Crown Estate an expected extra income of £1billion a year, which could boost the Sovereign Grant by more than £100million annually if the formula is not revised.
But the King asked in January for the wind farm profits to be used for the wider public good instead.
And last month, at the annual briefing on royal finances, a palace official said there would be an “appropriate adjustment”.