Can someone help me properly understand this please?
For years I have wondered aloud on here, under various nns, how Prince Edward can afford to live in a £30 million mansion when by all accounts his income is roughly £150,000 per year? Just because it didn’t seem fair!
Full disclosure: I have nothing against the Royals themselves but I would prefer a much slimmed down monarchy and eventually after many years, an elected Head of State.
And the official explanation seemed to be that as he is privately wealthy, he is putting funds in to renovate the property in exchange for a much reduced rent.
https://www.hellomagazine.com/royalty/870243/prince-edwards-peppercorn-rent-revealed/?viewas=amp
So initially, Edward seemed to pay a market rate rent of £5,000, which increased to £90,000 after he paid £1.36 million for renovations.
However, he later secured a 150-year lease extension in 2007 by paying £5 million upfront, and since then, he has been paying a "peppercorn" (a very nominal amount) rent presumably in exchange for keeping it in good nick?
Fair enough you might think. He is privately wealthy and the cost of renovating somewhere that size has to be enormous.
However, what I am really confused about now is the Crown Estate, the body with which these rents are negotiated.
Is it a public or royal organisation?
I initially thought it qualified as a royal organisation because it is owned by the monarch, but its profits go back to the Treasury, which surely then makes it a public body?
So if it is the latter, and its profits go in to the public purse, why are Edward and Sophie and their two dc living in a house with 120 rooms and paying a relatively small rent, when the Crown Estate should be extracting as large a rent for the public purse as possible?
Is this right? Happy to stand corrected.
And my other question is why is this arrangement so complex and the lines between public and private funding
so blurred?
In any other charity or organisation in this day and age, surely you have to have a clear, transparent division between the two?