Britain’s republicans won’t give up. In spite of trying to use the coronation of Charles III as an opportunity to push their campaign to abolish the monarchy, support for the institution has remained stubbornly high. It is our elected politicians – on both sides of the political divide – who seem to have lost support rather than the new King.
Not to be put off, however, the campaign group Republic has this week published its latest Royal Finances Report, claiming that the royal family is really costing us £510 million a year, nearly five times as much as the sovereign grant.
How does it arrive at such a figure? It claims the costs of the monarchy break down as follows:
Sovereign grant – £ 108.9 million
Income foregone from royal palaces and other buildings – £ 96.3 million
Income from Duchy of Cornwall which could go to taxpayer – £ 65.3 million
Income from Duchy of Lancaster which could go to taxpayer – £ 33.8 million
Royal Collection surplus – £ 11.8 million
Cost of local councils of royal events – £31.9 million
Security – £150 million
Other – £ 12.4 million
And if we didn’t have a monarchy? An elected head of state could cost us just £5 to £10 million a year, the group claims.
Sorry, but it doesn’t pass the smell test. Its £150 million estimate of the cost of royal security is put down to ‘various press reports over the years citing the Metropolitan police’. The Metropolitan Police’s budget for this year is £3.3 billion – so Republic is implying that £1 in every £22 is spent protecting the royal family – which seems improbable when the force has a city of 10 million inhabitants to police. Actually, while annual costs of £100 million have been reported for the branch of the Met known as the Royalty and Specialist Protection, that doesn’t just cover the royal family – it covers protection government ministers, politicians and other VIPs too. Even if we did away with the royal family we would still have a government to protect – as well as an elected head of state – so we could hardly eliminate these costs.
The idea that we could have an elected head of state for under £10 million a year is preposterous. It would cover the costs of a few staff and an office – although evidently not in Buckingham Palace, which Republic wants to let out for a net £70 million a year.
Good luck with that – even with 240 bedrooms, 19 state rooms and 92 offices in London’s inflated property market. You could sell it to developers for an impressive lump sum, I guess – as you could Hyde Park – but I doubt that flogging off London’s landmarks would endear you to the British public. Moreover, wouldn’t Britain need state rooms, even if it didn’t have a monarch? To run a head of state’s office for £10 million a year seems to assume that Britain would no longer entertain world leaders on state visits, nor that our head of state would ever travel abroad on official trips.
Nor is Republic prepared to conceded that the monarchy earns Britain a single penny in tourism revenues – merely saying that such claims have been ‘debunked’. The crowds who gather for royal events and who are to be found standing outside Buckingham Palace for the changing of the guard every day would appear to question this – unless you think that those same crowds would be interested in gathering for a peek at Tony Blair, David Cameron or whoever else became our head of state.
If you want to try to save the taxpayer half a billion pounds there are perhaps better alternatives than trying to asset-strip the monarchy.
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