ROYAL FINANCES

How much the royals actually cost - the question that republicans always lie about. You're about to see why.

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Figures for the year 2003 show that the royal family 'cost' each person in the UK 60p, up from 58p last year. The rise was caused largely by the Jubilee celebrations. However, these 'facts', although correct in themselves, fail to tell the whole story.

Costs

The gross cost of the royal family was £41 million. This was made up of three parts:

£9 million was the Civil List. This is the money paid to the Queen in return for surrendering the Crown Estates (see below). Only Prince Philip receives money from the List; other royal family members get nothing.

£27 million is Grants-in-aid. Basically this is the cost of maintaining royal buildings, which would be maintained whether we had a monarchy or not.

£5 million was the Royal Flight and Royal Train, but the royal flight in particular is used more often by government ministers than by the Queen herself.

The Queen also gets income from the Privy Purse, which basically is income from her remaining lands, the Duchy of Lancaster. This costs the taxpayer nothing, but she pays tax on it (see below).

Revenue

A conservative estimate is £168 million, made up as follows:

Most royal revenue is income from the royal lands, the Crown Estates. This body owns nearly 300,000 acres of land. Sounds a lot, but it's equivalent to a square block of land 21.5 miles on the side. A small but important part, however, is in Central London, and thus worth a lot of dosh - 75% of CE revenue is generated by its urban holdings. Revenue from the Crown Estates this year was £163 million - a lot, compared to the £9 million the queen gets in return!

As well as the aforementioned tax from the Duchy of Lancaster (£2 million), the country also receives tax from Prince Charles' Duchy of Cornwall (£3 million). In spite of the name only about 5% of its landholdings are in the county of Cornwall, and even more annoyingly for the Cornish, 20% are in Devon.

There are, of course, unquantifiable gains in the form of business generated by royal trips abroad, and tourism.

End Figure

If we ignore the tourism and business gains, the net gain to the country from having a monarchy of £127 million a year - or approximately £2.18 per person per year.

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