Royal family accused of levying charges on land that ’doesn’t belong to them’

The royal family have been accused in Parliament of levying charges on land that “doesn’t really belong to them”.

The criticism came after a Sunday Times and Channel 4 expose was published on the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall, which fund the King and the Prince of Wales.

The report revealed that the royals are making millions of pounds a year by charging government departments, councils, businesses, mining companies and the general public via a series of commercial rents and feudal levies on land seized by medieval monarchs.

Lord Berkeley, who questioned the legitimacy of this ownership, said he has seen the effects of this where he lives on the Isles of Scilly, where most the land and nearly a third of the residential buildings are owned by the Duchy of Cornwall.

Isles of Scilly

He said: “We’ve got one example of farmers on the Isles of Scilly, [who] want to see an abattoir built so they don’t have to transport animals to the mainland, which I think is a very good idea.

“The Duchy said, ‘well you can have the land’ – well, many of us think that they don’t own the land anyway, but leaving that to one side – they allocate land to an abattoir, they are then going to charge the farmer for using it.

“Is that right when the land probably doesn’t really belong to them and they’re not contributing to the cost?”

Lord Berkeley also raised concerns that the Crown Estate and the two Duchies are not bound by new enfranchisement rights for leaseholders.

He said: “He [the minister] says in his letter that the Crown bodies are not bound by the enfranchisement legislation which we debated over many months earlier this year.

“But I question how a private estate actually can not be bound by legislation like that and why should the Duchy be exempt.”

High fees

He added: “At the moment, the leasehold properties that they own there have very high fees, very short term leases, sometimes no more than 20 or 30 years and at the same time the properties that they rent are showing bad signs of poor management.

“And the roads around where I live are diabolical; you need to carry wellingtons all the time, because they’ve forgotten that the contractor that they’ve appointed didn’t really want to come and do it.”

He urged the Government to look at merging the finances of the Duchies into the Crown Estate and letting the King give the Prince of Wales what he needs to fulfil his duties “just like he does to Princess Anne”.

Treasury minister Lord Livermore responded: “Crown bodies, which includes the Crown Estate and the two Duchies, are not bound by the enfranchisement legislation, however during the passage of each iteration of enfranchisement legislation through Parliament, an undertaking has been given to Parliament that Crown bodies would comply by analogy with the legislation…

“The Crown Estate and the Duchies commit in the undertaking in the publication of their lease extension policies in the accepted areas, which will be possible once the relevant supplementary regulations for the legislation have been made.”