The power is already with Parliament; the MPs just need to decide to use it
See my previous post.
No problem with that in principle. There would need to be decisions on where the money came from if it was decoupled from The Crown Estate. There would need to be decisions about what other bills did not receive Parliamentary time to allow yearly discussion of this one. The recent SG Bill (Act next month) has fixed one of the 2011 anomalies.
This can all be achieved,
They are private, not public property. They are private estates since the 1300s, and were handed back to the monarchy for the personal property of the monarch/heir after the interregnum.
Under current UK/international law if they were seized by the state appropriate compensation would have to be paid
Come on now, that explanation was acceptable when we were ruled by barons, but in 2026, the duchies may be deemed private property for the purposes of the monarchy, but they include vast stretches of public coast line and sea in which lie vastly lucrative wind farms. The duchies are very much corporate entities that make £21 million a year in profit each, and yet are not subject to corporation tax. It should be noted that the Duchies also charge our public institutions, such as the NHS and the army, rent!
My understanding (from the last time I read a legal argument on this) is that members of the RF have the same rights under FOI as any other individual in the UK. You may have heard differently.
Lownie discovered that official government documents detailing Prince Andrew's ten-year tenure as a taxpayer-funded UK special trade envoy have been strictly sealed until 2065. Under current UK guidelines, official files on senior royals are withheld for 105 years from their date of birth.
And Lownie submitted hundreds of FOI requests to bodies like the Foreign Office and the Department for Business and Trade while he was writing Entitled. He describes the process as a game of "whack-a-mole," he encountered a prevailing culture of secrecy, and he noted that government departments relied heavily on exemptions to block access to travel and meeting logs.
There are already rules regarding gifts. Would agree to transparent registers for working royals, MPs and members of HoL
I don't think non-working royals should have any more scrutiny than any other private individual, as long as they are not receiving any tax-payer funded benefits
(I exempt security, as that is based on risk.)
Imho the existing rules regarding gifts are not tight enough as evidenced by the Fawcett the Fence allegations and the bags of cash issue, which constituted , apparently, a donation not a gift.
Non working royals is a grey area because people like Zara Tindall are patrons of charities, not just horsey ones, she attends public royal events such as Ascot and Buckingham Palace, and at the same time receives far more lucrative brand endorsements than other three day eventers competing at four and five star level. I have no problem with her personally but I think the rules need clarification.
And if HIHO is not allowed then there should be stricter rules that apply fairly across the board eg Sophie and Edward should not benefit privately from income by renting out the converted stables at Bagshott which they live in thanks to a peppercorn rent.
And the system of royal warrants needs investigating. In theory it should mean that no gifts are provided to the royals by brands such as Fortnums or Land Rover. But in practice. Lownie requested information from BP and LR as to whether the RF paid full price for their vehicles and he received no satisfactory reply from either!
The trouble with the hereditary system is that if William changes any of the above it is really a public acknowledgment that his father, or grandmother, or their agents, got things badly wrong and that is far harder to do than simply implementing a professional policy change between successive heads of state who already have a public mandate.