As company filings go, the accounts of the Crown Estate are unusual. The document is addressed to the sovereign, in a courtier’s whisper: “May it please Your Majesty, the Crown Estate commissioners take leave to submit this, their 70th report…” But it is also a reminder of the sheer scale of the monarchy, the things it owns, and the political power that is still concentrated in the Crown. In mid-July, Crown Estate officials appeared before MPs to justify their use of that power, which has – thanks to the King’s brother, Andrew – recently become rather more controversial.
The Crown Estate exists to spare us the humiliation of recognising that the King owns the sea. From any British beach (most of the shoreline is also the King’s property) the territorial waters stretch as far as the eye can see, and the seabed beneath them is entirely owned by Charles III. We could hardly pretend to be a serious country if we acknowledged that the very continental shelf on which our nation sits is owned by a man whose sole qualification for the job is that he has inherited a magic hat. So to make this situation seem normal, we agree that it’s owned by a company – a statutory corporation, to be exact – and the King just happens to own that.
The seabed (for 12 nautical miles from the shore) is just the beginning of the Crown Estate’s assets, which also include 2,475 residential properties, and Regent Street, and a quarter of a million acres of farmland, and all the unmarked mute swans, and 25,000 acres of forest, and the buildings of our parliament, and Ascot racecourse, and all the wild oysters and mussels in Scotland, and the Princesshay shopping centre in Exeter, and other wonders too numerous to list fully. There is even a principle, deep in our legal system, which decrees that any property without an owner will automatically transfer – or “escheat” – into the King’s immense portfolio. The Crown Estate is not the King’s private property but his public estate, and its profits are counted as public money. A big chunk of this public money goes straight back to the monarch as the Sovereign Grant (£137.9m this financial year), but the rest goes to the Treasury, and this is why MPs are able to call in the people who manage the King’s money and ask if it’s being used to the taxpayer’s benefit.
Appearing before the Public Accounts Committee were the chief executive of the Crown Estate, Dan Labbad; Helen Price, the estate’s chief financial officer; and James Chalmers, the Keeper of the Privy Purse. As the title suggests, there was at one point literally a massive purse that was carried around. The first person to occupy this ancient ceremonial role was Henry Norris, who had been Groom of the Stool (yes, the Wiper of the King’s Arse) to Henry VIII. Norris was falsely accused of consorting with Anne Boleyn and decapitated, which is what happens when you willingly take shit from your boss. It’s not often that one of these heraldic flunkeys emerges into public view, but many still exist: Britain continues to have a Master of the Horse, and a Clerk of the Closet, and an Apothecary to the Household, and a Warden of the Swans, and a Page of the Backstairs. We still have a Grand Carver of England, whose job it is to slice the monarch’s beef on ceremonial occasions.
Recently the Crown Estate has been doing very well indeed. It has returned £3bn to the public purse in the last five years, and this is mostly thanks to the growth of the offshore wind industry, to which the Crown leases areas of the seabed on which turbines can be built. In terms of income growth, His Majesty might be more accurately retitled as the National Windfarm Landlord. The money that pays for the windfarm leases comes, of course, from energy bills (paid by you) and from renewable energy subsidies (paid by you), but in the grand tradition of monarchical rule it is reframed as a gift to the public purse from a beneficent monarch.
Public spending is always political, and Dan Labbad acknowledged that the Crown Estate is held to “the same principles of managing public money as any public sector body”. Decisions about energy production and land use are especially political, but the King’s accountants were keen to present themselves as dispassionate financial stewards. They invoked the abstract entities – “the market”; “the industry” – on which so many political decisions are blamed. There was talk of usage topologies and supply chains and insourcing of property management. In the old days, a king would give his purse-holder a manor or two, but today this is decided by a remuneration committee. Labbad’s salary – on which he told the committee he did not think it would be appropriate to comment – was £2,325,875 last year, almost 14 times that of the Prime Minister.
But the really controversial decisions for the Crown Estate are those that relate to its buildings. The average British landlord makes a rental yield of about 6 per cent of the value of their property; the Crown Estate, which employs 980 people, gets about 2 per cent on its residential properties. This suggests a poor choice of tenants, the worst of whom is Andrew.
In 2003, Prince Andrew, as he was then, was given a 75-year lease on Royal Lodge, a 30-room mansion in Windsor Great Park. He paid the Crown Estate £1m for the lease, plus a rent of one peppercorn (if requested). Part of the deal was that Andrew would spend a further £7.5m on refurbishing the house. This works out, over the full term, at less than £2,200 per week. I found a one-bedroom flat on Kensington High Street that costs more than that (hilariously, the flat in question is listed as “student friendly”). This was quite the deal, and one from which Andrew drew further benefit by subletting the cottages on the estate. The Crown Estate never monitored how much Andrew charged, and its executives do not know how much he made from this. “That’s a matter for the tenant,” said Labbad.
But the tenant is not taking questions at this time, because the tenant was a close friend of the serial rapist and child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The extra attention now being paid to the cut-price deal Andrew received on using an asset in the sovereign’s public estate is gradually becoming a wider look into the wider finances of the Firm; the National Audit Office has already published one report. This is a good thing, but it’s also a rather academic exercise, because it makes no sense to talk about getting value for the taxpayer when you’re talking about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, who has nothing to offer the country in return. He would struggle to hold down a job as a draft excluder. All of the money ever spent on Andrew has been, by any sensible definition, misused.
But then, the same is true of his relatives – the oxymoronic “working royals” who are housed and protected for free, in a country that cannot afford to imprison its criminals or to remove asbestos from its schools or to pave its roads – and of course the King himself. His Majesty is the Christmas tree the bin-men forgot, which lingers rotting in the front garden, still clinging to its baubles and its scraps of tinsel. The only job he does is to act as a living argument against hereditary power. Support for the monarchy is at its lowest level since polling began. And yet, financially, he is still very much in business.
[Further reading: Nigel Farage doesn’t care about Clacton]
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This article appears in the 15 Jul 2026 issue of the New Statesman, After Keir Starmer
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Subscribe here to commentPrince George looked bored at the Wimbledon men’s final on Sunday – a forced smile when he had to shake hands with Jannik Sinner. All these people with extraordinary ability running around but what about me? Yes, quite. Maybe he is having strange thoughts about the succession? I do hope so.