The ancient property empires that fund the King and the Prince of Wales have remained a closely guarded secret within the royal family and its small circle of advisers for centuries.
Even parliament has been denied access to the list of landholdings held by the royals.
Today, a joint investigation by The Sunday Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches programme reveals the full details of the property estates owned by Charles and Prince William, and the tax-free business deals they have struck to maintain their wealth. The King is worth £610 million, according to The Sunday Times Rich List.
Here for the first time is every plot of land owned by the King and prince through their private fiefdoms — the Duchy of Lancaster and the Duchy of Cornwall:
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.
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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.
They operate as commercial landlords while having a special agreement with the Treasury exempting them from paying tax on their corporate profits. The duchies are not directly funded by the taxpayer but leases and contracts in the King and prince’s own names show they are making millions of pounds a year by charging the army, the navy, the NHS, the prison service and state schools to use their land, rivers and seashores.
We found their land holdings include:
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.
The duchies’ annual reports disclose only basic details of the property assets they hold. We obtained the reference numbers for 3,536 properties held by the Duchy of Lancaster and 1,874 held by the Duchy of Cornwall from the Land Registry.
The reference numbers enabled us to obtain the precise address for each land title and plot them on a digital map. We then matched the addresses with leases, contracts, planning documents and public records — and spoke to the duchy tenants — to gain a complete picture of how the monarch and his heir generate their private incomes.
Our Insight investigation reveals:
The 180,000-acre property empires
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 tax and operating status of the duchies has long been a source of contention. The Duchy of Lancaster says it operates as a commercial company and the Duchy of Cornwall says it is a “private estate with a commercial imperative”. Under a memorandum of understanding with the Treasury, they receive special tax status.
This means they pay no capital gains or corporation tax and do not have to comply with property laws such as compulsory purchase orders.
The King and the prince both pay income tax voluntarily at the highest rate (45 per cent) on the duchy money they receive. The last time Charles published his taxes, for the year 2021-22, he paid income tax of £5.9 million, which amounted to just 25 per cent of the £23 million duchy profit because he deducted expenses he considered related to his official duties.
William says he adopts the same approach as his father, although neither royal has revealed how much they pay in tax from their duchy incomes since 2022. Charles’s predecessor as the head of the Duchy of Lancaster, Queen Elizabeth II, did not declare how much tax she paid.
Parliament has tried to scrutinise the two duchies. In 2005, a report by the public accounts committee, then chaired by the Tory MP Sir Edward Leigh, recommended Charles, the Prince of Wales at the time, be stripped of his power to control the Duchy of Cornwall’s affairs.
It concluded: “The current arrangements stem from the 14th century, and the resulting income is to that extent an accident of history. After more than 600 years, it would seem sensible for the Treasury to review whether these arrangements remain appropriate to present-day circumstances.”
During the hearings, Bertie Ross, the keeper of the records for the Duchy of Cornwall, was repeatedly questioned about whether he would provide a complete list of properties owned by the duchy, so the royal estate could be scrutinised to determine whether Charles was practising the principles he preached to the public. He was asked: “Will you make the information available about the investments in order that judgments can be made by you, me and third parties about what is ethical and sustainable?”
Ross responded: “I do not think this is an issue which is relevant to this committee.” And until now the complete list of property holdings for both duchies had never been made public.
Fees to refuel Britain’s warships
On its website, the Duchy of Lancaster states that it “is completely self-financing and does not rely on any taxpayers’ money”. The Duchy of Cornwall also says that “it is not a public body, nor is it funded by the taxpayer”. However, 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, highlighted below, which runs alongside the Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, where Britain’s naval officers are trained.
William and his father both trained at the college as naval cadets, as did Charles’s father, Prince Philip, and grandfather, George VI. William was at the college last December, pictured below, with his ceremonial sword and navy greatcoat to thank the latest batch of new naval recruits at their passing-out parade.
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.
A few miles inland lies Dartmoor National Park, a key training ground for the army.
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, below. 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.
The Duchy of Cornwall owns the land on which the circular-walled prison stands and has opted to charge for its use. The latest lease, below, struck in 2022, shortly before Charles became King, lists the landlord’s name as: “His Royal Highness Charles Philip Arthur George, Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall Rothesay and Edinburgh, Earl of Chester Carrick and Merioneth, Baron of Renfrew and Greenwich, Lord of the Isles and Great Steward of Scotland.”
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.
How the NHS ended up with an £11m bill
The duchy property titles and the related leases setting out the business deals are all held in the monarch and the Prince of Wales’s own names. Charles and William say they are heavily involved in their estates.
An ITV documentary in 2019 revealed that the King was called “the boss” by staff during his time heading the Duchy of Cornwall and William is now similarly hands-on. The prince chairs the regular meetings of his duchy’s ruling council and has recently appointed his close friend William van Cutsem as a duchy adviser.
Staff have described how William directs them seven days a week via WhatsApp. “There will be weekends when my WhatsApp messages will be in double figures and I will be very responsive,” said Alastair Martin, the Duchy of Cornwall’s former keeper of the records, just before he left the role to join the King at the Duchy of Lancaster. “If something has gone well or badly, I will want to tell my boss and he’ll be straight back.”
William says he wants the estate to further social goals, including tackling homelessness, hitting net zero for the duchy by 2032 and launching mental health programmes.
In the ITV documentary, Charles was shown presiding over the Duchy of Cornwall council meetings and visiting tenants. He now oversees the Duchy of Lancaster and has appointed his former Cornwall adviser Sir James Leigh-Pemberton to chair its ruling council, which reports to him.
The Duchy Files reveal more deals in which the royal estates charge public services. In January last year, the Duchy of Lancaster said it was pleased to be of assistance when Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust needed to find garage space for a new fleet of electric vehicles it was buying to tackle ambulance waiting times.
The duchy put out a press release saying it had “granted” the hospital trust a red-brick 1980s warehouse close to Tower Bridge. “We are delighted to be able to help and support the trust’s ambition to upgrade to an all-electric fleet,” Adrian Bayliss, the duchy’s commercial manager, said.
However, the contract below reveals that to use the 27,000 sq ft two-storey warehouse, the NHS is paying rent of £829,348 a year to the King’s duchy. That will amount to at least £11.4 million over 15 years.
The lease shows that the rent charged by the duchy from the NHS is 67 per cent more than the £15 per square foot that was being paid by the Metropolitan Police, which vacated the same warehouse only a few months earlier.
In 2011, Charles struck a deal to charge St John Ambulance, a charity of which the King is now patron, a one-off payment of £60,000 to lease a garage in Poundbury, his duchy-built model town in Dorset.
Just down the road, the duchy charged the Dorset Fire Authority an up-front payment of £612,000 to lease land over 125 years for a new fire station, which was required to be designed in a mock-Georgian style including a balcony, shown below, to fit in with Charles’s architectural vision for the town.
Devon county council also pays the duchy £300 a year — amounting to £15,000 over its 50-year lease — to use a fire station in Princetown, on Dartmoor.
State schools that sit on duchy land are not spared the royal rent requirements either. The Duchy of Cornwall struck a deal in 2017 to charge Devon county council at least £319,000 in rental fees over 21 years for the right to use Princetown Community Primary School, on Dartmoor.
The duchy is also charging Farrington Gurney Church of England Primary School, near Bath, £60,000 for the use of its premises over 25 years. Welton Primary School, near Bath, and Little Dewchurch Primary School, near Hereford, had to agree deals with the duchy worth £3,800 and £3,500 over ten years to be permitted to play sport on their fields.
Launceston College, a secondary academy school in Cornwall, pays £189,000 over 30 years to use a Dartmoor farmhouse owned by the duchy as a base for Duke of Edinburgh’s Award expeditions and educational trips.
The lease says the school must foot the bill for the property to be refurbished to “the full satisfaction of His Royal Highness”.
Schools on duchy land are not always made to pay rent. When Charles publicly opened Nansledan School, near Newquay, in 2010, as part of a vast property development he was overseeing, he charged just a single peppercorn a year.
Sir Edward Leigh, the MP, questioned whether it was right for the royals to be profiting from public services. “They’ve got to accept they’re not a business,” he said. “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.”
Leigh said the Duchy Files had justified his committee’s call two decades ago for details of the royal landholdings to be released to parliament. “All this proves that transparency works and that our bid for it those many years ago is vindicated,” he said.
A royal monopoly on the River Mersey
There are thousands of moments a day at Liverpool’s new cargo port, shown below, when a crane lifting a container crosses an imaginary boundary in the air and a virtual counter ticks.
The King earns money each time it happens, thanks to the ancient “right of oversail”. The monarch’s Duchy of Lancaster charges at least 30p for each container transported between the ship and land. And the pennies all add up.
Privately owned Liverpool2 is Britain’s largest transatlantic container terminal and has the capacity to handle more than a million containers a year. The port pays Charles a minimum of £150,000 a year no matter how many containers cross the line and much more if it is a bumper year for cargo loading on or off ships at the quayside.
Since 2008 the duchy has also received at least £560,000 from the Mersey Docks and Harbour company to operate four 75-metre-high wind turbines, pictured below. They stand on a platform on the edge of the port, which is over a part of the river bed owned by the King.
The King’s ownership of the northern foreshore of the River Mersey is allowing him to levy charges on other services affecting people in the city.
A couple of miles down the Mersey, in central Liverpool, stands the £8 million Gerry Marsden ferry pier, which was built 12 years ago by the Merseyside Passenger Transport Executive, a public body, with help from the European Regional Development Fund.
It was created to provide the city’s residents with a ten-minute ferry across the Mersey and to house the boats of the Marine Rescue Unit. As the pier is above the King’s river bed, however, the duchy has charged the transport executive at least £130,000 since it was built, and has inserted a clause in its lease that can increase the rent if the ferry ever makes a profit.
Further along the river, a major six-lane road bridge, the Mersey Gateway, was opened in 2017 to connect Runcorn and Widnes at a cost of £600 million to taxpayers. To recoup the expense, the local Halton borough council decided on a series of tolls: £2 for cars crossing the bridge and £8 for lorries and coaches.
But the council is having to pay the King, who charges for the right to operate the bridge. When asked about the sums of public money levied by the arrangement, Mike Wharton, the leader of Halton council, said: “I can’t break that confidentiality agreement.”
The Duchy of Cornwall has a similar deal in the Tamar estuary, where Prince William owns the river bed. A council-owned toll bridge joins Devon and Cornwall, but for permission to have cables to run across it, the duchy takes a cut of the bridge’s income.
In June, the King received a new windfall with the opening of the high-speed Isle of Man ferry from Liverpool. The Duchy of Lancaster earns £50,000 a year from the Isle of Man government for the use of the Mersey ferry dock.
There is even money to be made from the city’s sewage. Next to the construction site of Everton’s new football ground, an outfall pipe juts out into the Mersey over the duchy’s river bed.
It is owned by United Utilities, which pays the duchy £300 a year. The duchy’s lease states the royal estate is granting the firm “full right and liberty for the tenant … to use [the outfall pipe] for the purposes of discharging into the River Mersey effluent arising from the use of the Tenant’s adjoining Sewage Treatment Works at Sandon Dock”.
The duchy’s ownership of this coastline extends about 100 miles north of Liverpool to Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, and the Duchy Files reveal this has proved to be a cash bonanza for the King in recent years with the emergence of wind farms in the Irish Sea.
The beaches he owns look out onto the world’s second-largest offshore wind farm, which is situated just south of Walney Island. The wind farm needs to run cables across the duchy’s beaches to bring the electricity ashore.
In 2011, the duchy struck a deal that will make it a total of £4.5 million over 50 years from the owner of the wind farm, Walney Offshore Windfarm Ltd, a subsidiary of the Danish company Ørsted, just to allow this single underground cable to run under the shore.
A separate deal struck in 2020 with another Ørsted subsidiary is worth £14 million to the duchy over 50 years to allow more Walney wind farm electricity to be brought onshore via cables under the King’s beach at Potts Corner in Lancashire.
A third lucrative set of cables runs under Charles’s foreshore in Heysham, Lancashire, for which ScottishPower Renewables and Dong Energy have agreed to pay the monarch a minimum of £9 million over 50 years.
In total, the King’s estate will receive at least £564,000 a year — or £28 million over the 50-year lifetime of its leases — from this beach tax on wind farms, and potentially more as the rent rises with increases in output and price of the energy.
These deals are separate from revenue the King receives from wind farms built on Crown Estate land. Last year Charles was praised for agreeing to cut his share of the Crown Estate’s wind farm revenues. The estate had made a record billion pound profit largely from the huge windfall it received from leasing the sea bed to off-shore wind farms.
Three mining deals in a year
Of the 5,410 plots of land in England and Wales revealed by the Duchy Files, 2,682 give the King and prince the right to mine for minerals.
Just over a decade ago, the duchies sent out letters to thousands of people reasserting their ownership of mineral rights dating back to feudal times over pockets of land across the country. The letters advised homeowners that, while they may own their land and buildings, the soil and rock beneath them actually belonged to the royals.
The royal estate said that getting in touch was a formality required because of changes in the Land Registry rules. “This application is solely to protect [our] rights, and does not indicate that the duchy had any present intention to work the minerals,” the Duchy of Cornwall wrote.
Since then, the duchies have been active in selling the rights to mining companies, allowing them to dig and drill in protected landscapes.
In the past eight months, the Duchy of Cornwall has struck three mineral rights deals. In March this year, it signed a licence agreement with Cornwall Resources Ltd, a subsidiary of the multinational firm Strategic Minerals, which gave the firm the go-ahead to drill for metal deposits in the Tamar Valley’s designated area of natural beauty.
In June, the duchy sold permission to Cornish Tin to drill for minerals around the disused Phoenix United Mine on the east of Bodmin Moor, which is also designated an area of outstanding natural beauty. And this summer it granted another licence to Cornish Tin to search for new mining opportunities around the Great Wheal Vor, in eastern Cornwall. The value of these contracts has not been made public.
In the Great Wheal Vor area, a campaign group of local people last month wrote to the King and Prince William to protest. The letters stated that the duchy’s granting of drilling licences to mining companies was inconsistent with the royals’ public statements about the importance of protecting the environment. The duchy replied simply stating that their comments were noted.
It privately argues that the mining licences are merely a response to the government’s industrial strategy to source rare minerals in the UK.
The Duchy of Cornwall has already been making hundreds of thousands of pounds from a deal with the German company Heidelberg Materials, which operates a large open-cast quarry, below, in the Tamar Valley. Heidelberg has long been a target for environmental groups as one of Europe’s biggest Co₂ emitters.
The Hingston Down quarry was first opened 100 years ago but has been very active over the past two decades. Residents who live nearby, such as Vanessa Peel, complain about the monthly explosions to dislodge tonnes of rock from the hillside, which they compare to the aftershock of an earthquake. “First you hear the boom and then you feel it,’ said Peel.
Other locals complain the quarry work is damaging their homes and health. They claim the mine often emits an unbearable asphalt stench, fills the air with polluting dust and once caused flooding that left a yellow sludge in their gardens.
Heidelberg is paying the duchy an annual rent for mineral and access rights in the quarry, and has also been taking a cut of profits on the stone. A lease from 2004 to 2014 shows the duchy received a yearly base rent of £25,000 plus VAT — amounting to more than a quarter of a million pounds — plus a cut of 38p per tonne of stone dug from the mine.
Heidelberg confirmed it has a continuing agreement with the royal estate granting it the right to extract granite from a part of the quarry that was last worked 15 years ago.
The King also stands to make millions from the mining giant Anglo American, which is building a vast potash mine called Woodsmith on the protected North York Moors National Park.
The project, initially run by a company called Sirius, sparked a mini gold rush and was heavily supported by landowners, who stood to make money from the scheme, and local residents who bought shares in Sirius.
Objections came from dozens of environmental bodies, including two that the King represents as patron: the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the Campaign to Protect Rural England. The North Yorkshire Moors Association pointed out the incongruity of siting a “large heavy industrial estate” in a protected area of outstanding national beauty.
After constructing the mine buildings, Sirius suffered a severe cash crisis and the company was bought by Anglo American. The work to sink the shafts has been slowed down. The mine remains part-finished.
The King’s duchy is still receiving £102,000 a year under the terms of its 70-year lease with the mine. If the mine becomes fully operational, the duchy will get £256,000 a year in rent and 2.5 per cent of minerals sales — potentially earning Charles tens of millions of pounds.
The Duchy of Lancaster could also make up to £4 million from a deal struck with Saint-Gobain, a French company, for the right to mine gypsum rock under land near the England football team’s training ground at St George’s Park, near Burton upon Trent.
The Football Association (FA), of which William is patron, objected to the proposals because it was concerned the work might cause the national team’s pitches to collapse. Saint-Gobain has since said it will take measures to ensure the mine does not cause the pitches to subside and the complaint has been withdrawn.
All the mining companies say they operate with the necessary permissions and within regulations and use modern techniques to minimise damage to the environment. They argue they were extracting minerals that were important for the economy and provided local employment.
£22m in rent via Thames Water and charities
The Duchy Files show the full extent to which both duchies are run as modern-day corporate commercial landlords.
Commercial rental agreements will provide the royals with income of: £16.8 million from a barristers chambers in London over 21 years; £4.6 million from a newspaper distribution warehouse in Hemel Hempstead over ten years; £5.5 million from a hair and beauty products company for use of an industrial unit in Blackburn over five years; £669,000 a year from the Post Office for two south London warehouses; £1.3 million over ten years for a Southend shopping centre; £20,000 a year from the Reading Crown Plaza hotel; and £15 million from Harrogate Ladies College over 50 years.
The Duchy of Lancaster also owns and leases out the Barthomley service station on the M6.
Asset transfer documents show how the Duchy of Cornwall has been making big money by trading properties. In 2022, it made a £33 million profit on a warehouse in Milton Keynes it had bought 11 years earlier for £38 million. No capital gains tax would have been payable on this transaction.
The duchy owns Camelford House, a 1960s office block, seen below, that occupies a prime spot in London next to the MI6 building overlooking the Thames.
It has become known by letting agents as “Charity Towers” because so many charitable organisations have rented offices there, including Macmillan Cancer Support, the hospice charity Marie Curie, Comic Relief, Landmine Action and the World Society for the Protection of Animals. The King is patron of Macmillan and Marie Curie, and William has appeared on television to promote Comic Relief.
Leases show the duchy owns the freehold to Camelford House as the charities’ “superior landlord”, and lets the building to a head tenant, Thames Water, which then sublets the offices.
The rents are set by Thames Water at a commercial rate. Under the contract, the duchy receives a third of the rents collected from the building — at least £22 million over the past 19 years. Over the same period, the charities’ rent payments for offices in the building amounted to: £16.8 million from Macmillan; £10.3 million from Comic Relief; and £9.1 million from Marie Curie.
The rent on offices leased by Macmillan from 2005 to this year were increased over that period by close to 90 per cent. The charity left the building this summer in order to downsize and cut costs. Marie Curie has also moved out, complaining in its annual report of an “onerous lease”.
Last week, the two charities said they believed they had paid rents in line with market rates and had always dealt with the head tenant when negotiating the sums they paid. Thames Water said: “Our rents are competitive and benchmarked against market value.”
The duchies also retain ancient privileges. For example, the Duchy of Cornwall benefits from “bona vacantia”, which entitles William to take possession of any property in Cornwall when an owner dies without an heir. According to its annual report, of the £288,000 the duchy said it gave to charity last year, more than half of this money was from bona vacantia.
The duchy structures some of its leases so that it takes a cut of the revenue generated by businesses — a tactic deployed by other commercial landlords. For example, William owns the land underneath a whisky distillery that opened three years ago in Princetown, Dartmoor.
Princetown Distillers not only pays £10,000 a year in fixed rent over 125 years to use its premises — a total of £1.25 million — but also a “production rent” that gives the prince a cut of every litre of alcohol it produces. If the distillery produces whisky at capacity, the production rent could end up exceeding the normal rent.
A similar principle applies at the Hole in the Wall pub in central Exeter. It pays a basic rent of £40,000 a year to the duchy plus an additional “turnover rent” on money made from drinks, food and vending machines. The Duchess of Cornwall pub in Poundbury, which Charles and Camilla are shown visiting in 2016, below, pays 50 per cent of its net profits to the prince.
Examination of leases reveals the sheer variety of different types of charges levied on charities, businesses and individuals by both duchies, on everything from fishing rights to digging a grave.
The Duchy of Lancaster is charging £280 a year plus VAT for the use of a wooden hut in St Bride’s Major by the Scouts, of which Charles is patron.
In Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, six lifeboat stations owned by the Royal National Lifeboat Institute (RNLI) — another charity of which the King is patron — pay £600 a year in total to use duchy beaches in Salcombe, Sennen Cove, the Lizard, Rock, Penlee Old and St Mary’s.
Other examples of fees include:
The duchies rent out more than 900 residential houses and farms to tenants, and are involved in new building projects to create even more. This includes the construction of 24 houses and flats for the homeless as part of a scheme to build 4,000 properties in Nansledan, Newquay, as William revealed to The Sunday Times earlier this year. The Duchy Files reveal that 32 of the 300 homes owned by the King and rented out to tenants have energy ratings of F or G — below the minimum legal standards set by the government under laws designed to prevent climate change, known as Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs).
Last week, the duchy admitted one in eight of the properties it is letting out are rated F or G. It said those properties that did not have exemptions were awaiting scheduled improvement.
Finally, the King’s land in Derbyshire is rented to a portable toilet supplier. The Duchy of Lancaster has made £125,000 over the past five years from a company named ExcLOOSive. And in the Isles of Scilly, the prince is profiting from a public toilet. He receives £60 a year from the Council of the Scilly Isles for a lavatory on the Island of St Martin’s.
‘Transparency is absolutely imperative’
In 2013, a report by the Commons public accounts committee, chaired by Labour’s Baroness Hodge of Barking, called for a full Treasury investigation into the duchy business deals to see whether their special tax status gave them an unfair competitive advantage over other firms. But the recommendation came to nothing.
Andrew Sanford, a partner at Blick Rothenberg, a leading tax advisory firm, said: “The duchies’ tax exemption gives them an unfair competitive advantage because it allows them to keep more of the money they make than their competitors and therefore allows them to undercut their rivals in commercial negotiations. Last year’s increase in corporation tax from 19 per cent to 25 per cent has exacerbated this. At a time of clear pressures on the public purse, this unfair benefit to the [duchies] should be reviewed by the government.”
Hodge said this week that the Duchy Files demonstrate “a massive lack of transparency” in the royal estates. “It’s absolutely imperative that there should be greater transparency over how they get their money,” she said. “There is something shockingly wrong with a system where you allow a lot of profits to be made out of property and you are not finding a way of taxing it properly.”
“I was able to calculate more readily what Google, Amazon and Starbucks should have paid us in taxes than I was able to see whether or not public money was being properly used [by the duchies] and whether or not the royal family, through these organisations, were making a proper contribution back into the public purse for the public good.”
A Duchy of Lancaster spokesman said: “The Duchy of Lancaster operates as a commercial company, managing a broad range of land and property assets across England and Wales. It complies with all relevant UK legislation and regulatory standards applicable to its range of business activities.”
“While His Majesty The King takes a close interest in the work of the duchy, the day-to-day management of the portfolio is the responsibility of the council and executive team. The financial and environmental performance of the duchy is disclosed each year in our published report and accounts which are independently audited and freely available on the Duchy of Lancaster website.
“The Duchy has made a number of key environmental improvements in recent years, delivering a significant increase in the number of A+, A and B EPC ratings awarded to our properties as a result of refurbishment or restoration works.”
A Duchy of Cornwall spokesman said: “The Duchy of Cornwall is a private estate with a commercial imperative which we achieve alongside our commitment to restoring the natural environment and generating positive social impact for our communities.
“Prince William became Duke of Cornwall in September 2022 and since then has committed to an expansive transformation of the duchy. This includes a significant investment to make the estate net zero by the end of 2032, as well as establishing targeted mental health support for our tenants and working with local partners to help tackle homelessness in Cornwall.”
Dispatches: The King, the Prince and their Secret Millions is on Channel 4 at 8.10pm on Saturday night and afterwards on channel4.com
