The Times of London and Sunday Times have a new series called “The Duchy Files,” where they’re exposing the shocking ways in which King Charles and Prince William exploit businesses, charities, public services and everyday citizens through the Duchy of Lancaster and Duchy of Cornwall. The Duchy of Cornwall is the purview/income of the Prince of Wales. The Duchy of Lancaster “belongs” to the sovereign, who is now King Charles. People know that the duchys are vast real estate networks, but I always assumed that the duchies were mostly commercial property (office buildings & the like) and farms. I didn’t know that the duchies consisted of sh-t like “all of the shoreline and riverbeds on Devon’s coast.” The Times has revealed the first part of their series, and here’s a link to the coverage, which is insane. Some highlights:
In a five-month investigation, we used the royal addresses to uncover their business contracts and discovered how the duchies are making millions of pounds each year by charging government departments, councils, businesses, mining companies and the general public via a series of commercial rents and feudal levies on land largely seized by medieval monarchs. The Duchy Files show the royals charge for the right to cross rivers; offload cargo onto the shore; run cables under their beaches; operate schools and charities; and even dig graves. They earn revenue from toll bridges, ferries, sewage pipes, churches, village halls, pubs, distilleries, gas pipelines, boat moorings, opencast and underground mines, car parks, rental homes and wind turbines.
The royals’ formal duties, palaces and official households are paid for each year by the sovereign grant. This is funded by an agreed percentage of the income that the government-run Crown Estate makes by managing land surrendered by the monarch 260 years ago. Next year the grant will give the royals £132 million. But the King and prince also receive private incomes from the profit generated by their duchies. Last year the Duchy of Lancaster raised £27.4 million for the King and the Duchy of Cornwall raised £23.6 million for William, which they can use as they see fit, for example to fund their private homes, personal income and staff.
Our Insight investigation reveals: All 5,410 landholdings and properties held by the royal duchies[ The NHS will pay the King’s duchy £11m over 15 years to rent a warehouse for ambulances; Ministry of Justice pays William’s duchy £1.5m a year to use Dartmoor prison; The army pays to train on Dartmoor, the navy to moor and refuel its fleet; Charges are levied on Liverpool container port, the Mersey ferry — and a sewage pipe; Charities have paid millions to rent a 1960s office block in central London.
The Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall stretch beyond the counties they are named after to cover 180,000 acres of England and Wales. They are largely made up of land and seashores seized by kings in the centuries immediately after the Norman Conquest. The royals surrendered control of the Crown Estate to the Treasury in the 18th century but the monarch and his heir were allowed to keep their duchies, partly because they did not generate much income. However, their revenues have soared in recent decades and today the duchies are sprawling modern property businesses with assets jointly worth £1.8 billion, according to their annual reports.
The Duchy Files reveal that both the monarch and the prince have contracts with taxpayer-funded public services that pay them millions. The Duchy of Cornwall land extends along large stretches of the seashore and rivers around the southwest of England, including the bed of the Dart estuary, which runs alongside the Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, where Britain’s naval officers are trained. But the lease document below shows that over the past 20 years, the duchy has charged the Ministry of Defence a total of at least £900,000 for the right to moor boats on the waters surrounding the college, which are needed to train the recruits on the river.
Thirty miles down the coast at Plymouth, the prince’s duchy owns the shoreline next to Devonport — western Europe’s largest naval base and a refuelling site for Britain’s Trident nuclear submarines. William is commodore-in-chief of the submarine service. In 2017, a 125-year deal was struck that required the navy to pay the duchy £10,000 a year for access to its own oil depot, so it can refuel its warships. At the same base, the navy has been paying the prince a further £3,250 a year to use a jetty. The duchy’s lease specified that the MoD had to spend at least £900,000 on the jetty’s construction, even though its ownership will eventually revert back to the prince when the lease ends. When the navy wanted to deploy navigation beacons on the sea at Plymouth Sound, the duchy charged them £100.
The King is the head of the armed forces and the prince is a lieutenant colonel in the army. Yet William’s duchy, which owns 67,500 acres of Dartmoor, is charging the military for the right to train on the moorland under a 21-year deal struck when Charles was Duke of Cornwall. The duchy describes this as “a private arrangement between landlord and tenant”. When we sought disclosure of the lease under the Freedom of Information Act, the MoD responded with a copy of the lease pictured below, but redacted the amount paid, and even blanked out the prince’s name. Philip Sanders, a local Conservative councillor and a Dartmoor National Park warden, said: “I see no reason why the duchy couldn’t agree to let the MoD use the moor without charge because it’s the training of troops for the defence of our land.”
In the middle of the national park stands HMP Dartmoor. Built by the Admiralty with taxpayers’ money in the 19th century to hold French prisoners in the Napoleonic wars, today it is a category C prison for 640 non-violent inmates. Under its terms, the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) is required to pay the prince £1.5 million a year — at least £37.5 million over the 25 years of the lease. The annual rent is more than double the amount paid in the 1980s, even after taking into account rises for inflation. Within the contract is a “dilapidations credit” clause that compels the MoJ to spend a minimum of £68 million over the next decade updating the buildings at the prison.
Did you know that William gets £1.5 million a year for Dartmoor prison? Jesus. And charging the military exorbitant rates for the use of what should be federal land. The Times went on from there to detail how Charles and William’s duchies charge charities and public services like “garage space for ambulances” (£829,348 a year) and leasing land for a fire station (£612,000). The duchies are also charging exorbitant rental rates for SCHOOLS, from elementary schools up through a couple of colleges. One MP, Sir Edward Leigh, the MP, suggested that it’s actually really tacky that the royals profit so heavily from public services: “They’ve got to accept they’re not a business. Don’t make a profit from public services like the armed forces and the NHS. This shows the value of scrutiny, because from now on, if they are charging [a public service], they will know it’s going to be scrutinised and people are going to ask why and they’ve got to justify it.” Justify it? How are people not rioting in the streets? Instead of putting public funds into public services, millions of taxpayer dollars are going to “renting” seabeds, coastlines and land from Charles and William, all of it based on lands “seized” just after the Norman Conquest??? This is asinine.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.