Royal family gets financial boost from offshore wind and palaces
By Stephen Castle
New reports on the finances of Britain’s royal family and its ancient property portfolio have revealed a double dose of good news for the household, which has been destabilised by illness and injury in recent months.
Profits from the Crown Estate, which oversees the royal family’s massive land and property holdings, jumped to £1.1 billion (about $2.2 billion) from £442.6 million in the previous year, according to the estate’s annual report, mainly thanks to deals involving the leasing of seabed sites to offshore wind producers.
King Charles and other royals on the balcony of Buckingham Palace after attending the King’s Birthday Parade in London last month.Credit: AP
As a result, the money the royal family receives from the UK government — known as the sovereign grant — will rise to £132 million in 2025-26, up from £86.3 million in recent years.
For centuries, net profits from the Crown Estate have been passed to the government, in return for a fixed yearly payment to fund the royal family and its duties. Since 2012, this payment has taken the form of the sovereign grant, which is calculated as a percentage of the estate’s profits.
King Charles III previously requested that the anticipated surge in profits from the wind power deals be used for the “wider public good.” As a result, the previous government agreed to reduce the sovereign grant to 12 per cent of net profits from this year onward, down from 25 per cent.
If the grant had remained at 25 per cent, the king would have received £275 million instead of £132 million, a huge rise that could have jeopardised the royal family’s popularity at a time when much of Britain is still mired in a cost-of-living crisis.
The CEO of the Crown Estate, Dan Labbad, wrote in the annual report that the profit boost was “short term in nature,” adding that over the coming years “revenue and valuation will normalise.”
A separate report on the funding of the monarchy published by the royal household on the same day said that the number of visitors to Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle returned to “almost pre-COVID levels” in the year to April 2024. That helped drive a rise in another source of royal income to £19.8 million, about double what it was in the previous year.
But the document also underlined the ongoing costs of a 10-year project to refurbish and repair Buckingham Palace, along with work to upgrade Windsor Castle. One project to replace water pumps and tanks at Windsor cost £465,000 in the year, contributing to a total so far of £10.59 million.
Britain’s National Audit Office, a public spending watchdog, said on Tuesday that overall, the royal household had managed the £369 million project to renovate Buckingham Palace well, but added that some projects had overrun. Works in the palace’s East Wing were completed two years late and came in at 78 per cent over the estimated cost.
That was in part because of the pandemic and inflation, but also because more asbestos and structural damage had been found in the palace than expected. Those challenges, the watchdog said, “could have been foreseen.”
The report published by the palace, an annual accounting of its operating expenses, details how the king spent the sovereign grant and how the family tries to meet its objectives, through public engagements, charity visits and events.
Family members took part in 2,300 engagements in Britain and abroad, the report said, significantly less than the total in the year before the pandemic, when Queen Elizabeth II and her family managed 3,200 official engagements.
The ranks of royals able to fulfil official duties have thinned following the decision of Prince Harry and his wife Meghan to step back from their roles in 2020, and the deaths of Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth.
King Charles’ cancer diagnosis this year, and that of Catherine, Princess of Wales, meant that two of the family’s best-known figures temporarily stepped back from public appearances, although the king continued to undertake his constitutional duties.
After almost three months away from the spotlight, Charles returned to public duties in April, while Kate appeared in public for the first time last month, taking part in a ceremonial parade in London.
But their health issues will continue to affect the number of public appearances, the report said. “Following the announcement about the health of his majesty and the princess of Wales, there will be fewer public engagements in total during the period of treatment and recovery,” it said.
The king undertook 464 official engagements in the year to April, ranging from receptions for foreign dignitaries to a visit to the set of the Eurovision song contest in Liverpool.
Among the plethora of detail contained in the report was the number of messages the king and the princess received by mail wishing them well following their health announcements: 27,620.
Buckingham Palace is also making progress on its goals to recruit a more diverse workforce. The palace said 11.4 per cent of its employees were from ethnic minorities, though that was still short of its objective of 14 per cent by 2025. The mean gender pay gap has decreased from 4.2 per cent to 2.2 per cent, the document said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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