Spending Review: more smoke and mirrors with the civil list and the ‘Crown Estate’

Part of yesterday’s (20 October 2010) Spending Review was a reform of the Civil List.

At the moment the ‘system’ is a ‘Civil List’ payment whose annual amount is agreed for ten year periods and is supplemented by three different grants-in-aid. These provides government funding for maintenance of the royal palaces, communications and transport for what is supposed to be official business.

None of this includes the stratospheric cost of security for  members of the royal family on public duty, or everyday security for those who warrant it  – and indeed for those who simply demand it – like Prince Andrew for his two endlessly partying daughters.

Now, from 2013-14 there will be a single grant – the Sovereign Support Grant, reviewed annually and described as to be paid for from ‘Crown Estate revenues’.

This is designed to protect the monarchy from public criticism on the costs involved, by making it seem as if they are simply being given more of their own money.

This is not the case.

The simple truth  -  carefully laid out in a recent major article we have published on the real nature of the ‘Crown Estate’ and the ‘Crown Estate Commissioners’ is that:

• the ‘Crown Estate’ is no more than a name for a specific portfolio of assets that once belonged to the monarch and have long since belonged to the nation
• the ‘Crown Estate Commissioners’ are simply civil servants charged with managing these assets – whose revenues go to the Treasury.

The naming of the asset portfolio and the civil servants who manage it is another example of the particularly – and unhealthy – British fudge around tradition, its fondness for cap-doffing and for political  manoevre – as in this case.

At a time when the country is in serious trouble, however self-inflicted it largely has been, there would be public unrest if we were seen to be paying what will be substantially more into a pond in which many hangers on still enjoy a subsidised swim and which is inadequately accounted for.

So saying that the increased funding will come from the ‘Crown Estate’ is a sophist way of fooling the general public and disguising the fact that the cost of the monarchy will rise steeply within the four year period of the cuts to national public spending. The amount of the rise to come has not been specified and may well not yet have been precisely agreed.

The national press are complicit in this sleight of hand.

Yesterday’s Guardian produced the following: ‘Since the 1760s the crown has surrendered the receipts from its estates — £230m in 2008-9 — to the Government in return for the civil list grant, currently set at £7.9m since 1990 and topped up from reserves to £14.2m last year’.

This is not dishonest in the letter of what is said but disguises the core facts, is dishonest in spirit and perpetuates a misleading fiction.

Referring to some national assets and to those who manage them in this way is deceiving and unnecessary. We do not name each of our national assets to describe how we came by them – and if we did, the convention would keep alive much that we prefer to bury.

The systemic handling of these particular assets – in nomenclature and accountability – needs to be regularised and demythologised.

At the moment it is opaque, unhelpfully manipulative and frankly dishonest.