King gives staff £600 to help with rising bills

The King will give his staff a £600 bonus if they earn less than £30,000 a year, it has been reported.

Hundreds of royal workers have been told they will get £600 on top of their pay this month.

The cash, which will be given in a one-off payment, is expected to help with the cost of living crisis.

Staff who will benefit from the cash include cleaners, footmen and servants.

The payments are believed to amount to tens of thousands of pounds and would partially come from the King’s private income. There are 491 full-time equivalent staff across the royal palaces paid for from the Sovereign Grant, with the annual wage bill coming

to £23.7 million, according to the royal accounts for 2020-2021.

Buckingham Palace declined to comment.

The news comes as Queen Consort Camilla has revealed her love for dogs in a foreword for a book.

In Top Dogs: A British Love Affair, she writes about her love for her Jack Russell terriers Beth and Bluebell.

She writes: “My own dogs, Beth and Bluebell, cannot claim to have saved any lives, but I am, nonetheless, very proud of their resilience.

“I adopted them from Battersea (another charity of which I am Patron) several years ago. Beth came from a family who could no longer care for her and poor Bluebell had been found abandoned in the woods, three weeks old, starving, covered in sores, with a docked tail and just a few patches of fur.

“Battersea nursed her back to health and I fell in love with her when I visited their brilliant centre in 2012.

“They are both colourful characters – and now I cannot imagine my life, my home or my sofas without them,” she added.