The Queen has had her plea for millions of pounds of extra public money turned down by the Government.
Palace aides have said there is a £6.5 million black hole in the royal accounts and claim Parliament has a constitutional duty to ensure the Queen is financially secure.
The Department of Culture, Media and Sport already gives the palace an annual grant of £15m a year, and ministers say that budgets are already stretched.
Royal aides claim the palaces will need £32m of refurbishment and maintenance in the next 10 years and the costs of maintaining the Royal Household are increasing.
The grant was set in the 1990s and has been frozen for a further three years.
The Civil List, an additional sum provided by Parliament to pay for the monarch’s public functions, is fixed at £7.9m, but this year’s palace accounts show that expenditure will reach £14.4m - an overspend of £6.5m.
A Palace source told the Independent: “We have spent a lot of time convincing the Department for Culture Media and Sport of the merits of our case but I am not convinced they are listening very carefully to our arguments. It is a major disappointment.”
The Treasury say that an announcement on the Civil List will be made “in due course”.
In June the Queen’s accountant Sir Alan Reid asked for a minimum £4 million annual increase on top of the £15 million annual grant for maintenance of royal residences but was turned down.
(Telegraph)
technomist
The Court of St James really does live in a world of its own. Maybe if the Queen were to mix with the public a bit more (and not across a rope at one of her garden parties where guests are divided into two-tiers of the human species - VIPs and the hoi poloi), she might have more of a clue.