As Rachel Reeves struggles to balance the books, the Royal Family should forgo a £46 million increase in their funding. AIBU?

You have done a David Irving and deliberately twisted the meaning out of context to push an agenda that the late Queen was a thief.

My understanding is that the set up was different. It was a grace and favour home tied to being a working royal, rather like members of the Cabinet get mansion flats on Downing Street and Admiralty House.

Why am I twisting words if I quote from public record?
Internal records of the Crown Estate show ...

You really think she personally did this? She had staff whose concern was to ensure the best outcome for their employer, like any superrich person.

I think she was highly misguided in her decisions over Andrew, but that doesn’t mean she was trying to steal from the British public, as you imply.

Wow you twist words. That doesn’t mean for her gain. It means for UK gain.

Re leases . The Queen gave Harry a long lease on a house near Windsor - then Charles removed that ? So which law was that ?
Andrew wasnt a ’working’ royal but he kept his sweet deal . So be a friend to pedophiles and have the FBI wanting to speak to you - and you can keep your peppercorn rent ?

As far as I know Harry paid back a couple of million for the taxpayer re renovation costs . Has Andrew ?
Or come to think of it have any of the Windsors repaid ?

Oh Elizabeth Windsor had her hand out for profits from the seabed !

Why wouldn’t she ? She tried to claim money for heating her palaces - a grant intended for the poor .
She invested in companies exploiting the poorest in society.
She had millions stashed off shore to make sure the taxpayer couldn’t benefit in any way. But @Genevieva you don’t ‘think’ she would have her hand out ?
Of course she did .

Her claim was based on the Canute like ‘belief’ that monarchs owned not just the land but the seabed . Time that nonsense was investigated too

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/05/how-the-queen-came-to-own-the-seabed-around-britain

@Genevieva

I can only assume you are quoting from the royal family website lol.

The crown estates are in no sense at all ‘private’ to Charles and William. They are held in ‘right of the crown’ . A fudge really. It’s a fact that the Windsors do not own them - in fact they will quote that fact to avoid paying taxes ( but then will say it is private when asked how much tax - William refuses completely to grant any info )

So - and it is now a when not an if - the Windsors finally get their grift cancelled - all the land and all the profits ( as was previously the case before Cameron was PM) will be to the state .

And so your attempt to say Andrew’s set up is ‘similar’ enough to other freeholders / leaseholders ? Laughable .

The late Queen didn’t ask for anything

I don't believe that's true

internal records of the Crown Estate show that Queen Elizabeth II personally expressed interest in extending the Crown's rights to the seabed in 1962.

The Queen's inquiry brought attention to an opportunity that the Crown Estate and government then acted upon, leading to a substantial increase in the Crown's holdings and future income from sources such as offshore wind farms

She was canny old Liz was

Yes Balmoral and Sandringham are privately owned. No, the Duchy of Lancaster is not privately owned in that it is not the personal property of Charles, as Balmoral and Sandringham are.

It was passed to the Monarch as an inheritance 750 years ago. If there was no Monarch it would be transferred to the State.

The late Queen didn’t ask for anything. The Crown Estate's ownership of the seabed was extended in 1964 by the Continental Shelf Act, which granted it rights within 12 nautical miles of the coast. This was driven by the discovery of North Sea oil and gas and a UN Convention on the Territorial Sea and the Contiguous Zone 1958.

Before this act, there was no specific legislation declaring Crown ownership of the seabed, and sovereignty was based on convention rather than a formal legal boundary. There was also no other mechanism by which the government could own and lease out or sell mineral rights for the seabed under our territorial waters.

Not like any other, but similar enough for the purposes I was setting out.

You are wrong. Balmoral, Sandringham and The Duchy of Lancaster estate are privately owned by Charles. The first two as an individual, the third in trust for the monarch. The Duchy of Cornwall is in a medieval trust structure for the Duke of Cornwall, heir to the throne of England (now the U.K.) to give that person independence from the monarch. None of these belong to the Crown, not to the Treasury, nor to the public. The income they generate is entirely for their owner / beneficiary. It might seem grossly unfair, but that doesn’t make it untrue. Clearly, if we had a revolution, the state could seize all. I don’t think we’d be any better off though. Successive governments have failed to manage the economy well for years. Arguably for the last century.

Its gone up because the seabeds were inexplicably made part of the Crown Estate because TLQ asked for them and they were handed over no questions asked! If the revenue drops, the money to the Royals doesn't drop. They get the same. The Palaces that are open to the public should be paid for directly out of the Crown Estate and the Civil List where the Royals are paid for what they do should be restored. Not this rubbish where they get handed a proportion of money no matter what they do or how many of them there are. I wonder if anyone is going to question Lord Major as to why he basically forelock tugged all our money and control over the Monarchy away in return for them 'voluntarily' paying taxes that William has now decided he doesn't even have to demonstrate he pays at all?

No they are investigating- let’s hope something comes out of it

Note the investigation is only concerned about issues surrounding the Windsors and the Crown estate .

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/dec/02/crown-estate-inquiry-andrew-mansion-lease

@Genevieva

You mention Andrew being a leaseholder ‘like any other’
No not the case.
You see he and the other Windsors ‘rent ‘ from the crown estate and it seems they have some special deal . I read that the whole crown estate set up is now being investigated - prompted by the revelations about Andrew- but maybe that is wishful thinking

No @Genevieva

The Duchys are public assets. William scoops his 25 million each year because he is heir . No heir , no pocketing of 25 million.
The Windsors do not own the land , though they certainly work hard to give the impression that they do .

Similarly they have no right to the % of the profits of the crown estate that they currently trouser . This was previously 100 % to the people . The Tories ( Osbourne and Cameron)changed the payment system after years of pressure from Charles and Elizabeth. They used to get an annual grant and it was more transparent ( and much much less!)

There is so much misinformation surrounding the whole Windsor grift

Well said.

I read somewhere that QE2 paid off Andrew's accuser with surplus income from Duchy of Lancaster funds. Yes, it was money held in trust for her but should these funds be considered private or public? Why could she not have paid the supposed £12m from her proper private funds, maybe those held in offshore tax avoiding schemes in Cayman Islands (as revealed in the Paradise papers).

I hope there are more and more programmes like this Dimbleby one... I'm amused it is on BBC and not hidden away on Channel5 or something.

I really can’t stand Andrew, but it will take a while to unravel his situation. He is a leasehold owner of royal lodge, like most home owners in London. There’s a danger if setting a precedent whereby all freehold land owners can seize property from home owners. And Charles does have a private income from the Duchy of Lancaster, among other sources.

Presumably, as the royal family only get a percentage, the amount the treasury received has also gone up massively.

We already know Rachel didn’t need to increase taxes. That’s why the head of the OBR has resigned - he is her fall guy because it was the revelation that she was made aware of OBR data shoring more headroom, then lies about it repeatedly.

@RainbowBagels I agree.

Andrew still hasn’t moved . And he’s holding out for more money . Charles is said to paying him out of his ‘private income’ . Charles has no private income. Everything he has he took from the people .
The tax payer is in effect paying millions again to Andrew , after paying millions for 60 years to Andrew for him to live in luxury and abuse others , when Andrew should be answering to the police.

Oh and they all probably pay a peppercorn rent for their mansions.

Honestly when I read ‘a president will cost more ‘ ( utter nonsense ) or ‘but they bring in so much money’ ( also 100% wrong), I can see how the Windsors have got away with it for so long .

But the whole corrupt edifice is crumbling , thank god , and it is due in part to increased information availability and more varied media sources .
Off to buy the new Norman Baker book . That guy is a machine re exposing the truth about the Windsors’ greed and I’m glad he’s getting more recognition.

Im glad pressure still seems to be on them. As we've seen from n the Andrew debacle they will only do things to their detriment by force of public pressure. They will need to be harrassed and hassled into changing, even if they say they will. Turned out after the Palace and Royalists saying how difficult it was to strip Andrew of his titles and how they were sure we should just trust them to do the right thing and these things take time blah blah it took one guy heckling Charles to put a rocket up their arses. Nothing will change with regards to slimming down, reduction of titles, paying taxes, not charging for things not cutting down their expenses until a light is shone on them and they have to. They are all the same and all of them are brought up to keep the survival of the Monarchy as their sole purpose in life. Everything else is done for that purpose, no matter how much they handwring about how hard their lives are and how they would rather be farmers or helicopter pilots. Harry tried that and realised too late that what he doesn't like is having to pay his own bills.

Actually it seems that, compared with other monarchies, ours is pretty poor value for money

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/apr/05/windsors-v-borbons-comparing-the-public-pay-of-european-royal-families

For anyone interested in this topic I recommend reading Norman Baker's book (And what do you do?). I thought I was relatively well-informed about the royal family, the tax regime and legal framework and their shenanigans. But i read the book with my jaw on the floor and finished it feeling angry and disgusted.

you don’t realise how ‘cheap’ our head of state is!!

Says who?
Quite the opposite in fact.
Maybe watch the Dimbleby 3 part on the Monarchy which discounts how 'cheap' they are. Part 2 covers this.
I will be watching on catch up next week