THE ROYAL FAMILY Palace finances are published after a hard year
FALL £10m AFTER COVID-19 HITS VISITOR NUMBERS TO ROYAL PALACES
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex helped boost royal finances hit by the Covid-19 pandemic last year with their donation of £2.4m towards the renovations of Frogmore Cottage.
Prince Harry and Meghan made the payment to reimburse taxpayers for the work on their Windsor home before they stepped back from royal life to start anew in California.
Accounts published by Buckingham Palace last week showed the £ 2.4m also covers the couple’s rent on the property for June 2020 to March 2022, when their lease on the property is up for renewal. The details of their rental agreement remain private.
Described by a senior Palace source as “a good deal” for taxpayers, the payment helped plug a £10mdropinsupplementary income received from the opening of royal palaces. This fell from £20.2m to £9.4m, reflecting the sharp reduction in visitor numbers and functions taking place because of the pandemic.
Lockdown also saw the cost of official travel fall by nearly 40%, from £5.3m to £3.2m, which included the £ 47,965 cost of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s 1,250-mile Royal Train tour last December. However, spending on property maintenance soared by £ 11.2m to £ 49.5m with the ongoing renovations of Buckingham Palace.
Elsewhere, accounts published by Clarence
House showed the Prince of Wales continued to fund the Duke and Duchess of Sussex until the summer of 2020, when they became financially independent after signing deals with the likes of Netflix and then Spotify.
A senior spokesman for Clarence House said: “As we’ll all remember in January 2020, when the Duke and Duchess announced that they were going to move away from the working royal family, the Duke said that they would work towards becoming financially independent.
“The Prince of Wales allocated a substantial sum to support them with this transition. That funding ceased in the summer of last year. The couple are now financially independent.”
The spokesman described the couple’s departure from the working royal family as “a matter of enormous sadness to the family”, but added: “I betray no confidence when I say they’ve been very successful in becoming financially independent.”
Last week’s report also showed that 8.5% of Buckingham Palace’s employees currently come from ethnically diverse backgrounds and that a target of 10% has been set for 2022.
“We are not where we would like to be, despite our efforts,” said a senior Palace source. “We recognise that we must do more.”
‘The Prince of Wales allocated a substantial sum to support the Duke and Duchess’