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Everyone in Britain has views about the royal family. In many cases, lots of views. Britain’s parliament, however, never lets the subject pass its lips. By long tradition, the House of Commons prohibits itself from any mention, let alone any discussion, of the monarchy or the royal family. This self-imposed gag – in which a centuries-old constitutional monarchy is unable to discuss constitutional monarchy – is infantilising and indefensible.
The gag may, however, be loosening. This week, the Commons public accounts committee announced an inquiry into the crown estate. The probe is a direct response to news that the disgraced former Prince Andrew (now Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor) and his brother Prince Edward have been paying “peppercorn rents” for very extensive properties owned by the estate. It is an extremely unusual move in the modern era.
The crown estate is a public body, established by statute in 1961. It is independent of both monarch and government. It is also a highly successful and profitable property company worth an estimated £15.5bn. Since David Cameron abolished the civil list system in 2011, the crown gets a generous and protected “sovereign grant” from the estate’s profits each year. As the estate gets a cut of all offshore wind development, among other things, the sovereign grant has provided a royal windfall that might have gone to the Treasury. The grant is due for review in 2026. It should be part of the new inquiry.
Royal finances are an entirely legitimate subject for full parliamentary accountability, and the kind of scrutiny advocated in the Guardian’s Cost of the crown series. As the Treasury accepted last week in a letter to the committee chair, Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the estate commissioners have “a statutory duty to maintain and enhance the value of the estate and the returns obtained from it”. In other words, as Sir Geoffrey had earlier informed the Treasury, the estate must provide “value for money”.
The committee is therefore doing its job by inquiring whether this is happening. Its findings are likely to generate great public interest, and rightly so. Value for money is a yardstick that inescapably unlocks the wider debate that parliament ought to routinely be holding about the appropriate workings of the monarchy. The inquiry is doubtless unwelcome for Buckingham Palace. But the announcement this week – a week in which David Dimbleby also began a strikingly sceptical BBC One series entitled What’s the Monarchy For? – may be a sign that times are changing for the crown.
That is partly because of changing attitudes. More specifically, it is also because the inquiry should lift a stone on the as yet unpublicised terms under which “grace and favour” residences were, and are, allocated. In addition, it should reveal the terms and responsibilities for ensuring their upkeep. This may mean further unwelcome stories for Mr Mountbatten-Windsor and for the palace.
The committee should not flinch from this task out of misplaced deference. Value for money is a proper and powerful tool of public accountability, whether applied to the NHS or to the monarchy. As the former Liberal Democrat minister Norman Baker has argued, the thoroughness of the inquiry will be judged in part by whether it can clarify the number of royal grace-and-favour residences and their costs. According to Mr Baker, in 1993, the last year for which he was able to discover a figure for such residences, there were 272. By contrast, the number of “working” royals stands at 11.
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