Where DID spendthrift Margaret get £20m? And how about the Queen Mum’s £70m...
THE Duchy of Cornwall and its companion piece, the Duchy of Lancaster, were not surrendered as part of the 1760 deal entered into between George III and Parliament as they were regarded as insignificant at the time.
These two vast estates are still eff ecti vely controlled by t he Royal Family – and today they are hugely profitable.
The first of these, the Duchy of Lancaster, comprises well over 40,000 acres, including highly valuable swathes of land such as the Savoy Estate off the Strand in London, ten castles and land in several counties across England.
Money derived from the Duchy goes straight to the monarch, as it has done for well over 500 years.
The Duchy of Cornwall, which dates from 1337, owns a third of Dartmoor National Park, about 160 miles of coastline, lots of rivers and riverbeds, and residential and commercial properties galore.
This includes highly valuable London sites such as the Oval cricket ground in South London. Its profits go to the Prince of Wales, as do many ancient privileges.
Prince Charles has the right to scavenge shipwrecks and to catch Royal fish, including whales, porpoise, grampuses and sturgeon.
He has the right to wine from every ship that lands in Cornwall and the seizure and confiscation of enemy ships in times of war.
As recently as 1973, Charles received his feudal dues of a hundred silver shillings and a pound of peppercorn from the Mayor of Launceston.
From the village of Stoke Climsland, the Duke – which is to say Charles – received a daily bounty of a salmon spear ( an instrument used to catch the fish) and a bundle of firewood while he was in residence locally, a bow made of alder from Truro, a pair of white gloves from the village of Trevalga and a pair of greyhounds f rom t he manor of Elerky in Veryan. A cottager near Constantine baked a lamprey pie with raisins in lieu of rent.
Some of these ancient privileges have very modern advantages. Under the right to create mines, for example, the Duchy registered in 2012 extraction rights for tungsten and iridium, a rare and valuable metal used in modern technology.
The right to foreshore gives a nice steady income from tourists parking on some Cornish beaches, or from surf schools that have been established. There are other advantages, too. The Crown was given exemption from the 1967 Leasehold Reform Act, which was then also claimed by the ‘private estate’ that is the Duchy of Cornwall. That
means that tenants of the Duchy do not have the automatic right – unlike just about everybody else – to buy their property outright or secure a lease extension.
And when a company located in either the Duchy of Cornwall or Lancaster i s dissolved, its assets are transferred not to the Treasury, as would be normal, but directly to t he Queen or Prince Charles.
Most significant of all, however, is t he cold hard cash. Prince Charles receives more than £21 million annually from the Duchy of Cornwall, which has net assets of more than £1 billion. The value of the Duchy of Lancaster, too, has ballooned and its holdings are now worth £533.8 million. Profits have grown from £12.9 million in 2012 to just over £20 million in 2018.
It is true that members of the Queen’s family, who used to receive money direct from the Civil List, now get their handouts from the Duchy of Lancaster’s income. But in every Royal cloud there is a silver lining.
The Queen claims these payments as a deductible expense, even though the rest of her family play no role in the Duchy. The result is to reduce significantly the tax bill she (voluntarily) pays.
Although it is termed a ‘private estate’, the Duchy escapes paying any corporation tax, an example of the Royals alternating between private and public status according to what benefits them in any given circumstance.
Given that the Duchy of Lancaster has its own government Minister, it seems clear to me that it is, in fact, a public asset, not a private one, and the profits it generates should go not to the monarch but straight into the public purse. For the monarch to keep them is Royal robbery.
If, on the other hand, it is argued that it is indeed genuinely private, then it should be subject to the same rules as any other private estate, notably in terms of taxation. The Royal Family should not have it both ways, but the problem is it seems they can and do.
ANOTHER giant wheeze is the exemption from inheritance tax for bequests from a king or queen to the heir who succeeds them.
For example, the Treasury is estimated to have lost out to the tune of between £20 million to £25 million on the death of the Queen Mother in March 2002. Tax-free gifts to her daughter included a priceless Fabergé egg collection, her string of racehorses and a valuable collection of paintings. Naturally, whatever is held in trust by the monarch but which belongs to the nation is exempted from death duties, and rightly so. This would include buildings such as Buckingham Palace and treasures such as the Crown Jewels and the Royal Collection. But why should inheritance tax not be applied to a monarch’s personal property, just as it is for every other person in the country? Why has it never been applied to private Royal possessions such as Balmoral and Sandringham?
There are those who believe that much of the Queen’s so-called private estate should be returned to the nation anyway.
Sandringham, Balmoral and the Osborne estate on the Isle of Wight were purchased by Queen Victoria from monies given to her by Parliament through the Civil List.
As a result of Albert’s regular pleadings of poverty they were given more than they needed to enable Victoria to carry out her constitutional duties, but then hung on to the cash and invested it in property.
Earlier this century, the public was rightly horrified when the grisly details of the abuse of expenses by MPs were uncovered.
Here were people in high office taking public money designed to support them in their job as elected representatives, and instead using it to provide duck houses, clear ivy off buildings, clean moats, buy luxurious furniture and the rest.
For the Royals to use Civil List money to buy and help amass a private property portfolio is no different: it is fiddling their expenses.
Abridged extract from … And What Do You Do? What The Royal Family Don’t Want You To Know, by Norman Baker, published by Biteback on Tuesday, priced £20. Offer price £16 (20 per cent discount) until November 12, 2019. To order, call 01603 648155 or go to mailshop.co.uk. FREE delivery on all orders – no minimum spend.
PRIVATE JETS? OUR ROYALS BELIEVE THEY DESERVE TO TRAVEL BY MAGIC CARPET!