Thread by @RepublicStaff

Tomorrow sees the release of the royals' annual accounts, which we've now had access to. It's worth taking a moment to appreciate how dishonest, absurd and indefensible the Sovereign Grant is. 🧵

The Grant was invented and introduced about 11 years ago by George Osborne, replacing the Civil List. The Civil List was pretty bad, but nothing like as bad as the Sovereign Grant. The Civil List was fixed by parliament every ten years, at which point MPs could debate the costs.

The Sovereign Grant is only ever reviewed by the Royal Trustees (the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Keeper of the Privy Purse). MPs no longer have any say in the assigning of budgets for the royal household.

The Sovereign Grant does not come from the Crown Estate, it is paid entirely by the government. If the Crown Estate vanished the Sovereign Grant would still be paid by the government.

The size of the Sovereign Grant is calculated with reference to the profits of the Crown Estate, initially at a rate equal to 15% of those profits, then later increased to 25% to pay for refurbishment of Buckingham Palace, which the royals had neglected for 60 years.

There is a golden-ratchet clause in the Sovereign Grant, which means that if the profits of the Crown Estate go down from the previous year, the Sovereign Grant does not. It will remain at the level of the previous year. For example, the Sovereign Grant is currently at around

£86m for the year. If Crown Estate profits dropped to zero, the Sovereign Grant would remain at £86m for the following year. This highlights the point we've often made that the grant comes from the government, not from the Crown Estate (the Crown Estate is very clear about this).

This arrangement is unique. Every other public body must submit proposed budgets and then negotiate how much money they'll get next year, based on what they spent in the previous year and what they expect they'll need in the future. For the royals they just keep getting large

increases year on year and their funding can never be cut, unlike funding for schools, hospitals or the police. The royals are not required to justify their spending in order to secure any increase in their budget, and they don't need to negotiate or face the possibility of cuts.

While public services have been facing severe cuts for ten years and public sector workers have seen their incomes drop in real terms, the Sovereign Grant has increased by more than 55% since 2012.

The Sovereign Grant is clearly absurd and indefensible. It is also deeply dishonest. The Grant has been allowed to give the false impression that the Crown Estate pays for the royals. In fact this is directly claimed by the royal household.

On their website the palace says: "Funding for the Sovereign Grant comes from a percentage of the profits of the Crown Estate revenue (initially set at 15%)." At best this is misleading, at worst it is a lie.
royal.uk/royal-finances…

On another page they do say that the Grant is paid by the government, but they continue to mislead with their presentation of the grant. For example, they claim the grant represents a cost of just £1.29 per person. That is nonsense. No other public expenditure is explained in

this way, and it is false accounting anyway. To get that figure they have to divide the grant by every man, woman and child in the country. Almost any public expenditure can be dismissed as trivial using that dishonest spin.

The impression is also created that the royals own the Crown Estate, and therefore they are funding themselves. That is also untrue. The Crown Estate belongs to the Crown, which is a state institution under the control of parliament. The royals have no claim to or personal

ownership of Crown property or assets. The royals continue to claim the grant is "in exchange for the surrender by The Queen of the revenue from the Crown Estate". This is nonsense. That exchange happened more than 300 years ago, and while there is a tradition of renewing that

exchange at the time of each succession, the monarch cannot refuse to renew it. That exchange was between two parts of the state, not between the royal family and parliament. In other words it was a re-organisation of how the state was run, to reflect the shift of

power and responsibility from monarch to parliament. Part of that exchange was also to relieve the monarch of the responsibility of paying for the judiciary and civil service, which were paid for from revenues from Crown land.

If we abolish the monarchy the Crown Estate would continue to provide 100% of its profits to the government, as it does now.

One of the biggest problems with the grant and the way it is presented is that it ignores more than £258m a year of costs to the taxpayer. The annual cost of the monarchy is at least £345m every year, when security, lost Duchy revenues, costs to local councils and other factors

are taken into account. That means more than 75% of royal costs are simply ignored by the palace, the politicians and the press. You can find out more here republic.org.uk/the_true_cost_…

Rather than dividing the total figure by the whole population in an effort to make it look cheap, the questions the royals and government need to answer are these: Can this expenditure be justified? Can we get a head of state that costs less than this, so we can spend that money

elsewhere? Why is the monarchy not facing significant cuts, while essential public services have been cut time and again over the past decade? Is this an ethical use of public money? What else could we afford for that amount?

The Irish presidency - which costs around €4.8m - demonstrates quite clearly that we can get an effective head of state for a fraction of the cost. Meanwhile, the £345m cost of the monarchy could pay for as many as 13,000 new nurses or teachers.

The Sovereign Grant is a scam, lobbied for by the royals and delivered on a silver platter by Osborne and Cameron. It should be scrapped. And then we should #AbolishTheMonarchy