The royal clan: who’s who, what do they do and how much money do they get?
T hey include England’s most senior freemason, who is estimated to have received the equivalent of £18m for his royal duties; a princess who is 56th in line to the throne and lives in 1.6 hectares of grounds in Richmond Park – and a grace-and-favour apartment 12 miles away in St James’s Palace; and a duchess who previously lived in a 21-room apartment in Kensington Palace but has been moved to a cottage.
Who are the UK’s working royals, where do they live, and what do they do, exactly? How much have they been paid for their participation in official royal engagements?
These may seem simple questions. But finding the answers is complex and requires a degree of informed guesswork. Buckingham Palace stopped releasing information about specific payments to individual royals in 2010. Asked for a complete list of public engagements of the 11 working royals, a palace spokesperson replied: “We are not resourced to provide a research facility of this nature.”
The Guardian estimated how much members of the royal family have received in total from official payments for their royal duties. The payments come from either public money or private funds derived from huge hereditary estates that fund the monarch and male heir, the duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall.
In the past, the government listed in parliament each year the amount of taxpayers’ money that was paid to each family member. We extracted these payments going back to the 1950s from the parliamentary reports of Hansard, and declassified papers in the National Archives. However, since 2010 the amounts paid to individual royals have been kept secret.
Buckingham Palace declined to say whether the annual payments had increased or ceased since 2010. As a conservative estimate,
Read more on theguardian.com
