Princesses to lose bodyguards as £50m budget faces cuts
PRINCE Andrew’s daughters Beatrice and Eugenie could lose their police bodyguards after Scotland Yard launched a review of the £50million-plus cost of royal security.
Senior officers want to slash the protection budget by up to 30 per cent amid mounting concern over the cost of providing round-the-clock bodyguards for young royals.
The Queen has given her approval to the security review amid suggestions that the Metropolitan Police bill for guarding the royals, often put at £50million-a-year, may have risen to as much as £100million when overtime and other factors, including foreign travel, are taken into account.
Other forces too face substantial bills for guarding royal residences in Surrey, Berkshire, Gloucestershire, Norfolk and Scotland and police across the country spend millions of pounds a year attending royal visits.
A Scotland Yard source said: “Reviews of the cost of security surrounding the royal family are quite common – we need to know how much we are spending on each area of our activity.
“But as the recession bites, there is pressure on all areas of public service to keep costs down.
“No one who needs security will be deprived of it.
“But the question has to be asked: Are there principals (VIPs) currently receiving full or part-time protection who really don’t need it?”
The review is believed to be across the board and covers former Government ministers who were under threat of assassination while the IRA was conducting its mainland murder campaigns in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.
But it will also focus on the young royals, particularly Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, whose constant partying and worldwide travelling on gap years have prompted concern about the increased costs of protecting them.
Eugenie, 19, who has spent the past few weeks in South-east Asia on her gap year, routinely costs £250,000-a-year to protect but the bill to the taxpayer has shot up by another £100,000 this year to allow a team of bodyguards to trail her.
Scotland Yard’s concerns over the rising costs came to a head this week after the Daily Express revealed that Eugenie was considering spending four years studying at Williams College, a £31,000-a-year arts university in Massachusetts, USA.
Her mother, the Duchess of York, was given a tour of the campus last month and is understood to have looked at other US colleges for her younger daughter, just as she did for Beatrice, 20, who ended up studying the history of ideas at Goldsmith College, London.
But a friend of Prince Andrew’s insisted yesterday that whatever colleges Fergie had visited, Eugenie, who wants to study English and art, would go to university in Britain.
