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

[User198174]

Due to an increase in Crown Estate profits, the government is set to increase its grant to the Royal Family from £ 86.3 million to £132.1 million.
As the Royal Family appear to be getting by at present on an £86.3 million grant, AIBU to say that they should share in the pain of the national squeeze on finances?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwy5lzq94gqo.amp

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Nothing to do with being spiritual. It is power & politics. Without the royal family the Protestant church loses its supreme head- could they continue without one, who knows? How do you think they keep their churches?

The Church of England is only one of many Protestant churches. The King is not the Head of the Church of Scotland. It still exists.

Just - Church of Scotland barely financially viable & selling off its assets.

@lemonraspberry

That’s an odd attitude . So you would be happy with an atheist head of the Church of England ?

I agree that because a Windsor ( for now) must be anointed head of the Church of England, the COE has a profile which does not reflect its dwindling numbers .
Something like 1% of the population of England are active COE members!
That anomaly needs to be addressed too.

The Church of England is hardly thriving.

He is bought off and bribed thpugh, with colossal amounts of money. We used to have diplomats who were paid far less. And of course the armed forces personnel, ditto. And the health service personnel… and the emergency services …

Probably worth noting he's not averse to carriers of cash, has had a close adviser embroiled in a cash for honours scandal and previously sacked the same close adviser who was found to be at the centre of an enquiry focused on the fencing of royal gifts.

He's also not averse to double dipping in the public pot on his own behalf but....nothing to see, natch.

Yes , still not a word of apology from the Windsors regarding their charging of public services , being slumlords , not paying their due tax .

The country is sinking and the very least the Windsors could do is forego their handout this year. Instead they are taking a bonus .
Where is this ‘duty’ that is always being trumpeted?

This will be interesting. On BBC

David Dimbleby asking what exactly the Monarchy is for. A 3 parter. The first part delves into Charles's influence on Government Policy. How politically impartial are the Royals? Charles still regularly writes letters to the PM and they are top of the pile at the weekly chat.
The second part is finances. (Is the Monarchy a giant Ponzi scheme? No, that isn't the title of the second part, just the Guardian's. It does cover how staggeringly expensive it is for us to have the indulgence of a Monarchy)
The third part is on soft power, and mentions the illegal prorogation of parliament,

www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/dec/02/whats-the-monarchy-for-review-david-dimbleby-bbc

And then we’ll pay ten times as much for an elected head of state, and their administrative staff etc who will change with each election, the elections themselves will cost in the billions.

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

This. Spend it on education and the nhs instead!

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

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.

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.

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.

@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.

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.

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.

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.

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

@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 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

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?

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.