Should we put the royal family on a budget?
It strikes me as pretty extraordinary, that the question should be asked as to whether a major national institution, one funded by the government, should be put on a normal budgetary footing. Every institution in the country has to go through the annual process of reviewing its finances, proposing a budget for the following year and submitting that to whoever it is that approves their spending of public money. Except for the monarchy.
The only argument I’ve ever heard to defend this is that it maintains the monarch’s independence. But that doesn’t add up, because lots of public officials are required to be independent, including police officers, the judiciary and various regulators. And because the monarch is not independent, she is there to do what she’s told by the prime minister. It also makes no sense because we can look around at other parliamentary democracies, including other monarchies, in Europe and see heads of state that have annual budgets set by parliament.
The royal household’s funding is entirely arbitrary, linked not to what it needs but to the rising profits of the Crown Estate, a state-owned property portfolio. I say rising profits because if those profits fall, as they have as a result of the pandemic, the Sovereign Grant doesn’t fall. And if one year the royals don’t spend what they’ve been given they don’t return the surplus to the government, they keep it for a rainy day, without any impact on what they’ll receive from the government next year.
This is an arbitrary, wasteful, unaccountable and irresponsible means of funding a public body. It makes no sense unless understood as a way for politicians to avoid talking about royal accounts, or to obfuscate the nature of royal funding. It has no place in a democratic society.
