The Queen: One is hard up

THE Queen is demanding more money from the taxpayer to maintain her crumbling palaces after being squeezed by rising costs and a Government spending freeze.

By Richard Palmer Royal Correspondent, Royal Correspondent

FEELING PINCH The Queen FEELING PINCH: The Queen

She is feeling the pinch after revealing an inflation-busting five per cent rise in the cost of the monarchy to £40million a year. [>

[>

But the Royal Family still costs each person in Britain only 66p a year – less than the price of two pints of milk or an iPod download, say courtiers. [>

***** SHOULD BRITAIN LEAVE THE EU? VOTE NOW *****[>

Buckingham Palace officials, who published the figures yesterday in the Queen’s annual report, blamed the increase on a rise in foreign travel and extra spending on maintaining the royal palaces and refurbishing property to let. [>

[>

Her costs have risen at almost twice the rate of inflation in the past 12 months, reversing years of real-term falls, as the credit crunch begins to bite. [>

[>

The £2million increase in the bill to the taxpayer  is a two per cent rise in expenditure in real terms. [>

[>

But senior royal aides revealed that the Queen believes she still needs much more to stop her royal residences falling into a dangerous state of disrepair. She has become increasingly concerned that she is losing out to the competing claims of the 2012 London Olympics.  [>

[>

The 82-year-old monarch has complained that the Government has repeatedly rebuffed her requests for an extra £1million a year for essential maintenance. [>

[>

Aides, who have warned repeatedly about the threadbare state of royal buildings, said the State Rooms at Buckingham Palace, where official guests are entertained, had not been refurbished since the Queen came to the throne 56 years ago. [>

[>

Sir Alan Reid, Keeper of the Privy Purse, warned that if ministers continued to refuse the royal request for extra cash, the Queen would face a £32million backlog in repairs by 2018. “This backlog relates to essential maintenance and does not include any allowance for projects such as the re-decoration of the State Rooms,” he said. [>

[>

The report highlights major areas of work needed, including a programme to replace potentially lethal asbestos. [>

***** SHOULD BRITAIN LEAVE THE EU? VOTE NOW *****

[>

Some £16million is needed to replace slate roofs at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle. Updating heating and rewiring for the first time in half a century at the Palace will cost £2.4million, while replacing Victorian water mains at Windsor is priced at £3million. [>

[>

Senior royal officials said the current £15million-a-year grant for upkeep of royal buildings would need to increase by at least £4million a year from the Government’s next comprehensive spending review in 2011-12. But a senior Palace official said he feared there was little hope of that because the Queen was competing with the Olympics for funding from the Department for Culture Media and Sport and her requests had continually fallen on deaf ears.  [>

[>

“The experience we’ve had in the last 10 years, we cannot be optimistic. We haven’t received anything, despite putting forward what we thought were persuasive claims.” [>

[>

The Queen gets £12.7million from the Civil List but the salary bill for her 311 staff has risen by 3.4 per cent to £9.1million. Sir Alan earns £187,000 a year. She does, however, have a £26million cash reserve built up during the 1990s, when her taxpayer-funded Civil List payment, which is set every 10 years, over-estimated the likely inflation rate. [>

[>

With domestic fuel bills set to rise by 40 per cent this year, courtiers said that, like all consumers, the Royal Family faced increased costs. But the Queen, who has invested in energy-efficient power units, managed to avoid last year’s rise in oil and gas prices by buying nine months in advance in bulk on the wholesale market. Her annual gas, water and electricity bill fell £200,000 to £2.2million. [>

[>

The £40million bill for the monarchy does not include royal protection, nor official gifts, entertaining and accommodation on overseas visits.[>

[>

***** SHOULD BRITAIN LEAVE THE EU? VOTE NOW ***** [>

Comments Unavailable

Sorry, we are unable to accept comments about this article at the moment. However, you will find some great articles which you can comment on right now in our Comment section.

Would you like to receive news notifications from Daily Express?