7 ms·

The Crown Estate

36 points by samizdis 5y ago

samizdis 5y ago
> According to the May 2021 edition of The Sunday Times Rich List, Queen Elizabeth II has a personal net worth of £365m. A whopping £100 million of that alone accounts for the queen's family's personal stamp collection, known as the Royal Philatelic Collection.
- gorgoiler 5y ago
  It’s fun to include the hypothetical market value of ones stuff in ones net worth. It’s not particularly instructive. It would also be interesting to know HMQE2’s liquid assets. It is all too common to be castle-rich and cash-poor.
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    It does get bit more interesting when the wealth has yearly net-cost... And really can not be liquidated. And some wealth brings more yearly than some other. With royalty and old upper-class this likely doesn't compare to more modern wealth.
  - spaced-out 5y ago
    > It’s not particularly instructive. I think the fact that one inherited dozens of castles and mansions that one can make exclusive use of, including lending them to people as political favors, including that one one's net worth is instructive.
    - gorgoiler 5y ago
      Right, but if I have 9 nuclear warheads and you have a net worth of $90b, who is the more powerful? (Assume a spherical warhead, with market value of $4m.)
      - spaced-out 5y ago
        What good are nuclear weapons? I'd rather have Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Holyrood Palace, Balmoral Castle, and a bunch of other properties, a giant vault full of treasure stolen from all over the world, plus titles I can dole out as political favors. $90b can't buy that.
- flir 5y ago
  In the very first Times Rich List (1989), the Queen was at the top on £5.2bn. Where has all the wealth gone? It hasn't. The Times changed the rules for the Queen (and only the Queen) after a nice note from the palace. Now, things she has full use of but can't sell aren't included (eg the Royal Collection).
  - tim333 5y ago
    A lot of the ownership is ambiguous between the Queen personally and the state.
    - mattowen_uk 5y ago
      Why are we talking about the 'Queen' like she's a private citizen who could cash out, and take all that money to a privately owned island in the Bahamas? Being 'Queen' is a job. She's effectively the CEO of a company (which is why it's informally called 'the firm'). She also works hard and has worked hard as a key member of the firm all her life. Being upset at the Queen for being rich, is like being upset at the board members of an international bank. It's not her personal money, that she can take with her if she stopped being the Monarch, in fact she has less of an option to do that. The Monarchy does so much for this country via tourism and and international relations, that we'd be worse off without them. Calculations have proven that they MAKE money for the country despite the huge cost in keeping the institution running.
      - Symbiote 5y ago
        > The Monarchy does so much for this country via tourism and and international relations, that we'd be worse off without them. This is the crap the royal family's press department churns out, to be repeated by fawning journalists trailing their every move. More tourists visit Paris than London. Unlike in London, they can go inside those palaces and see the art collections. The presidential guards in Athens or Moscow still do a ridiculous dance when they change shift, and Britain could keep their equivalent in a republic if it's what tourists want to see. Republics choose who represents them. If they want a conman with no respect for women, they can vote for Trump. They can change their minds and vote for someone else a few years later. Britain has Prince Andrew anyway.
- redis_mlc 5y ago
  The Royal family and friends own greater London, probably worth a trillion dollars. They're not required to file deeds on the land, so nobody can inventory or value it with any certainty. In the private world, U2, Rush and Irwin own city-sized land parcels in urban areas.
vasco 5y ago
The fact that over 60% of people like to live in a country where birth defines a family's worth as higher than everyone else is mind boggling. I understand at a fundamental level the worship of rich people, since it gives everyone something to work towards, "billionaires aren't so bad because I may be one some day". I cannot understand supporting the monarchy. Are any of the 60% around that could explain their thoughts? I come from a country with over 100 years of republic so maybe I lack perspective.
- rbirkby 5y ago
  As one of the 60%, its not about deity worship, but more about a sense of stability. Especially where the monarchy has effectively zero involvement in daily life. When looked at from a P&L basis the crown is pretty good value. Certainly compared to all the alternatives that have been tried.
  - noir_lord 5y ago
    I'm not in the 60% but I don't care enough to want to rock the boat either - an unelected figurehead head of state has some benefits. If I could snap my fingers and remove the royal family at no cost I would but otherwise there are bigger problems we need to address first.
    - pjc50 5y ago
      Indeed. Replace the House of Lords with something proportionally elected, for example.
      - alephu5 5y ago
        I think there's value in having an unelected second chamber, because the lords are freer to broach unpopular but important subjects. Nevertheless imo it would be much better to have them randomly chosen from society.
      - midasuni 5y ago
        Replace the commons with PR (STV on constituencies c. 6 times the size), replace the lords with people who have been in the commons for 20 years. Ensures fresh blood in the commons and removes the need to pander to the short term elections in the lords.
throwawa162888 5y ago
The crown estate is actually one of the only good things about the monarchy. I grew up in crown estate housing and it was well known to be the best social housing around. Much better than Peabody etc. In fact when austerity came in and they had to sell it, there were massive campaigns to fight it being sold off. I am a republican for the record.
- vr46 5y ago
  I lived in a flat managed by the Crown Estate and it was excellently managed, and then the whole thing was sold to Peabody and things were generally less good.
- yrro 5y ago
  A friend of mine purchased a cottage from the crown estate and it was not maintained competently, nor in a manner compliant with building regulations. The entire way they went about splitting up the land before sale was complete nonsense... the first draft of the deeds drawn up by the crown would have granted my friend the land he wanted plus half of his neighbour's cottage (as in, a line was drawn right through their living room!) I think on balance, it seems fairer to say that the Crown owns a lot of land, and doesn't have the resources to manage it all competently. Their view is from 10,000 feet and us normal people are like ants... (Interestingly, the only part of the law that the Crown does seem to have to obey is that regarding the listing of buildings. They performed some non compliant modifications on the cottage and were forced to change them back! Then again, perhaps the Crown merely chooses to go along with listings...)
ajdlinux 5y ago
If 75% of the profits go to the government (and arguably, as long as the monarchy continues to exist, the other 25% covers expenses that the government would end up funding anyway), then doesn't that make the Crown Estate actually a small Sovereign Wealth Fund more than anything else? Lots of the media coverage around the Crown Estate seems to focus on the wealth of the Royal Family - if I were their PR team I'd be trying to push the (quasi-)SWF angle pretty hard.
- pjc50 5y ago
  It is literally a Sovereign Wealth Fund, in that it's the wealth of the sovereign. It's just (like a lot of things in the UK) not very democratically accountable.
  - ajdlinux 5y ago
    What does it mean for a SWF to be "democratically accountable"? Given SWFs generally act like other large scale institutional investors - I suppose democratic accountability has put political pressure on some SWFs to act on ESG concerns (changing investment strategies away from fossil fuels towards renewables, voting in favour of climate activist resolutions, etc) but apart from that, is there any reason to think that the Crown Estate is doing a bad job at maximising returns to the government? (And to be clear, though I suspect you know this - I'm not using the S in SWF to refer to the head of state specifically, but to the government, as is the traditional meaning)
vmception 5y ago
People get too caught up on "ownership" There are lots of orphaned entities on this planet which collect capital and grow capital and pay out to different parties who are not shareholders, who are not directors, or to no one. This is not a complicated concept. Well, it is to certain people, the ones who will squabble over a debate about it for 100 years while nothing meaningful changes. In the sake of this article, just make a flow chart instead of dancing around the concept of ownership like its a mysterious controversy for 10 paragraphs.
spoonjim 5y ago
The Crown Estate is in no meaningful way owned by Queen Elizabeth. It’s dishy to talk about it but functionally it’s just a UK government asset.
- arbuge 5y ago
  From the article: "However, 25% of the profits are given back to the queen and the royal family as part of the Sovereign Grant, which is used to fund the royal family itself on an annual basis. For example, this year's figure of £85.9 million is 25% of The Crown Estate's profits in 2018/19. So that means the queen's own personal fortunes are directly connected to the performance of The Crown Estate."
  - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    Yeah, but the Sovereign Grant is used to fund the sovereign (and related family members) in her working role as head of state. This is for things like people employed in the Royal Household, people who maintain Buckingham Palace, etc. Note this is separate from the income of the Duchy of Lancaster (for the monarch) and the Duchy of Cornwall (for the Prince of Wales), which is more like personal income. Wikipedia has a good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Grant_Act_2011 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Grant_Act_2011
    - daniel-cussen 5y ago
      Oh, come on, it's like being president, only moreso. Being president means you have to travel all the time, of course! And how are you going to fly, in business? Of course not! You think the people employed in the Royal Household wouldn't hustle to get the Prince of Wales a sandwich if he asked for it right away? At a certain point income and status are the commingled. I remember the quote from I think Tony Blair, that he never handles money, when a fee comes up for cash he would ask one of his bodyguards for bills.
vmception 5y ago
Any private foundation or trust can function this way. These kinds of organizations have no owners only contracts that specify conditional outcomes. Anybody can make these. Anybody can capitalize them. They can own the titles to anything. The trustees can be natural persons and other entities and other trusts, and governments. The trustees can be swapped out with no public record of it ever changing. The directors and administrators can change as well. There is an infinite number of them in existence. It isn't more or less complicated that the Queen of England is intrinsically tied to one. The article does a disservice by leading with that. The primary confusion is just in the name of the entity "The Crown Estate" as both a concept and a registered entity, the concept of the Crown/Monarchy, and the personal private holdings of the Queen. But these can easily be abstracted away by simply re-labeling them in a chart and not acting like its that confusing.
- ohazi 5y ago
  Why does a trust like this not run afoul of the rule against perpetuities? [1] Is it because as long as there are living directors, they can technically vote to change the rules? Who would these directors for the Crown Estate be? The Queen? Parliament? A person at the top of the management chain? Is there an actual mechanism (other than tradition, good will, etc.) that prevents the entity managing/controlling the Crown Estate from voting to change the rules about how it's governed and who gets what proceeds? It seems that the answer to this question is that an act of Parliament could (probably?) change the rules, therefore it's not a perpetuity, and the share to the monarch is a tradition that they just aren't inclined to change right now. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities
  - vmception 5y ago
    Why? Because that’s not a real law, its a creature of the courts and every time the legislature got involved it was to make a real law that abolishes any notion of the concept of limitations from your own article “Many jurisdictions have statutes that either cancel out the rule entirely or clarify it” The places that only clarified it have created lengths of time exceeding anyone. In the US some states made a length of time longer than the age of the nation itself UK areas having similarly long results or abolishing the notion
djrobstep 5y ago
It's very simple really - it's a government-owned sovereign wealth fund, with an unusual clause that 25% of the revenue goes to the Queen. In this context, "crown" means "government" more than "queen", eg "crown land" means "government land". If the UK ditched the monarchy, the government would continue to own this property, but keep the 25%.
denton-scratch 5y ago
100mill in used stamps? "And a FANTASTIC collection of stamps To win friends, and influence his uncle"
neilwilson 5y ago
They’re going to really get excited when they realise the crown estate is actually the whole of England and Wales (less the duchy of Cornwall iirc). The bit they are talking about is the residual that hasn’t had a “freehold” tenancy granted to some other person. You can’t hold land in England and Wales. The Crown owns it all. All you can hold is a heritable interest in land - an interest that returns to the Crown if you die Bono Vacantia.
- martinflack 5y ago
  I believe you're describing the sovereign holding "allodial title", which is (mostly) true in all jurisdictions deriving from English common law, including, for example, the US States (well, 49 of them), so it's not a practice constrained to England and Wales, or to monarchy. (But IANAL.) I think some US States had a feature where you could pay a fixed amount to satisfy all future property taxes, but I don't believe it relieved the possibility of eminent domain, escheat, or police power.
MomoXenosaga 5y ago
The English monarchy is very different from its European counterparts. They sadly never experienced the reformation of the French Revolution the ensuing Napoleonic wars and 1848.

36 points by samizdis 5y ago

> According to the May 2021 edition of The Sunday Times Rich List, Queen Elizabeth II has a personal net worth of £365m. A whopping £100 million of that alone accounts for the queen's family's personal stamp collection, known as the Royal Philatelic Collection.

gorgoiler 5y ago
It’s fun to include the hypothetical market value of ones stuff in ones net worth. It’s not particularly instructive. It would also be interesting to know HMQE2’s liquid assets. It is all too common to be castle-rich and cash-poor.
- Ekaros 5y ago
  It does get bit more interesting when the wealth has yearly net-cost... And really can not be liquidated. And some wealth brings more yearly than some other. With royalty and old upper-class this likely doesn't compare to more modern wealth.
- spaced-out 5y ago
  > It’s not particularly instructive. I think the fact that one inherited dozens of castles and mansions that one can make exclusive use of, including lending them to people as political favors, including that one one's net worth is instructive.
  - gorgoiler 5y ago
    Right, but if I have 9 nuclear warheads and you have a net worth of $90b, who is the more powerful? (Assume a spherical warhead, with market value of $4m.)
    - spaced-out 5y ago
      What good are nuclear weapons? I'd rather have Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Holyrood Palace, Balmoral Castle, and a bunch of other properties, a giant vault full of treasure stolen from all over the world, plus titles I can dole out as political favors. $90b can't buy that.
flir 5y ago
In the very first Times Rich List (1989), the Queen was at the top on £5.2bn. Where has all the wealth gone? It hasn't. The Times changed the rules for the Queen (and only the Queen) after a nice note from the palace. Now, things she has full use of but can't sell aren't included (eg the Royal Collection).
- tim333 5y ago
  A lot of the ownership is ambiguous between the Queen personally and the state.
  - mattowen_uk 5y ago
    Why are we talking about the 'Queen' like she's a private citizen who could cash out, and take all that money to a privately owned island in the Bahamas? Being 'Queen' is a job. She's effectively the CEO of a company (which is why it's informally called 'the firm'). She also works hard and has worked hard as a key member of the firm all her life. Being upset at the Queen for being rich, is like being upset at the board members of an international bank. It's not her personal money, that she can take with her if she stopped being the Monarch, in fact she has less of an option to do that. The Monarchy does so much for this country via tourism and and international relations, that we'd be worse off without them. Calculations have proven that they MAKE money for the country despite the huge cost in keeping the institution running.
    - Symbiote 5y ago
      > The Monarchy does so much for this country via tourism and and international relations, that we'd be worse off without them. This is the crap the royal family's press department churns out, to be repeated by fawning journalists trailing their every move. More tourists visit Paris than London. Unlike in London, they can go inside those palaces and see the art collections. The presidential guards in Athens or Moscow still do a ridiculous dance when they change shift, and Britain could keep their equivalent in a republic if it's what tourists want to see. Republics choose who represents them. If they want a conman with no respect for women, they can vote for Trump. They can change their minds and vote for someone else a few years later. Britain has Prince Andrew anyway.
redis_mlc 5y ago
The Royal family and friends own greater London, probably worth a trillion dollars. They're not required to file deeds on the land, so nobody can inventory or value it with any certainty. In the private world, U2, Rush and Irwin own city-sized land parcels in urban areas.

vasco 5y ago

The fact that over 60% of people like to live in a country where birth defines a family's worth as higher than everyone else is mind boggling. I understand at a fundamental level the worship of rich people, since it gives everyone something to work towards, "billionaires aren't so bad because I may be one some day". I cannot understand supporting the monarchy. Are any of the 60% around that could explain their thoughts? I come from a country with over 100 years of republic so maybe I lack perspective.

rbirkby 5y ago
As one of the 60%, its not about deity worship, but more about a sense of stability. Especially where the monarchy has effectively zero involvement in daily life. When looked at from a P&L basis the crown is pretty good value. Certainly compared to all the alternatives that have been tried.
- noir_lord 5y ago
  I'm not in the 60% but I don't care enough to want to rock the boat either - an unelected figurehead head of state has some benefits. If I could snap my fingers and remove the royal family at no cost I would but otherwise there are bigger problems we need to address first.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    Indeed. Replace the House of Lords with something proportionally elected, for example.
    - alephu5 5y ago
      I think there's value in having an unelected second chamber, because the lords are freer to broach unpopular but important subjects. Nevertheless imo it would be much better to have them randomly chosen from society.
    - midasuni 5y ago
      Replace the commons with PR (STV on constituencies c. 6 times the size), replace the lords with people who have been in the commons for 20 years. Ensures fresh blood in the commons and removes the need to pander to the short term elections in the lords.

throwawa162888 5y ago

The crown estate is actually one of the only good things about the monarchy. I grew up in crown estate housing and it was well known to be the best social housing around. Much better than Peabody etc. In fact when austerity came in and they had to sell it, there were massive campaigns to fight it being sold off. I am a republican for the record.

vr46 5y ago
I lived in a flat managed by the Crown Estate and it was excellently managed, and then the whole thing was sold to Peabody and things were generally less good.
yrro 5y ago
A friend of mine purchased a cottage from the crown estate and it was not maintained competently, nor in a manner compliant with building regulations. The entire way they went about splitting up the land before sale was complete nonsense... the first draft of the deeds drawn up by the crown would have granted my friend the land he wanted plus half of his neighbour's cottage (as in, a line was drawn right through their living room!) I think on balance, it seems fairer to say that the Crown owns a lot of land, and doesn't have the resources to manage it all competently. Their view is from 10,000 feet and us normal people are like ants... (Interestingly, the only part of the law that the Crown does seem to have to obey is that regarding the listing of buildings. They performed some non compliant modifications on the cottage and were forced to change them back! Then again, perhaps the Crown merely chooses to go along with listings...)

ajdlinux 5y ago

If 75% of the profits go to the government (and arguably, as long as the monarchy continues to exist, the other 25% covers expenses that the government would end up funding anyway), then doesn't that make the Crown Estate actually a small Sovereign Wealth Fund more than anything else? Lots of the media coverage around the Crown Estate seems to focus on the wealth of the Royal Family - if I were their PR team I'd be trying to push the (quasi-)SWF angle pretty hard.

pjc50 5y ago
It is literally a Sovereign Wealth Fund, in that it's the wealth of the sovereign. It's just (like a lot of things in the UK) not very democratically accountable.
- ajdlinux 5y ago
  What does it mean for a SWF to be "democratically accountable"? Given SWFs generally act like other large scale institutional investors - I suppose democratic accountability has put political pressure on some SWFs to act on ESG concerns (changing investment strategies away from fossil fuels towards renewables, voting in favour of climate activist resolutions, etc) but apart from that, is there any reason to think that the Crown Estate is doing a bad job at maximising returns to the government? (And to be clear, though I suspect you know this - I'm not using the S in SWF to refer to the head of state specifically, but to the government, as is the traditional meaning)

vmception 5y ago

People get too caught up on "ownership" There are lots of orphaned entities on this planet which collect capital and grow capital and pay out to different parties who are not shareholders, who are not directors, or to no one. This is not a complicated concept. Well, it is to certain people, the ones who will squabble over a debate about it for 100 years while nothing meaningful changes. In the sake of this article, just make a flow chart instead of dancing around the concept of ownership like its a mysterious controversy for 10 paragraphs.

spoonjim 5y ago

The Crown Estate is in no meaningful way owned by Queen Elizabeth. It’s dishy to talk about it but functionally it’s just a UK government asset.

arbuge 5y ago
From the article: "However, 25% of the profits are given back to the queen and the royal family as part of the Sovereign Grant, which is used to fund the royal family itself on an annual basis. For example, this year's figure of £85.9 million is 25% of The Crown Estate's profits in 2018/19. So that means the queen's own personal fortunes are directly connected to the performance of The Crown Estate."
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  Yeah, but the Sovereign Grant is used to fund the sovereign (and related family members) in her working role as head of state. This is for things like people employed in the Royal Household, people who maintain Buckingham Palace, etc. Note this is separate from the income of the Duchy of Lancaster (for the monarch) and the Duchy of Cornwall (for the Prince of Wales), which is more like personal income. Wikipedia has a good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Grant_Act_2011 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Grant_Act_2011
  - daniel-cussen 5y ago
    Oh, come on, it's like being president, only moreso. Being president means you have to travel all the time, of course! And how are you going to fly, in business? Of course not! You think the people employed in the Royal Household wouldn't hustle to get the Prince of Wales a sandwich if he asked for it right away? At a certain point income and status are the commingled. I remember the quote from I think Tony Blair, that he never handles money, when a fee comes up for cash he would ask one of his bodyguards for bills.

vmception 5y ago

Any private foundation or trust can function this way. These kinds of organizations have no owners only contracts that specify conditional outcomes. Anybody can make these. Anybody can capitalize them. They can own the titles to anything. The trustees can be natural persons and other entities and other trusts, and governments. The trustees can be swapped out with no public record of it ever changing. The directors and administrators can change as well. There is an infinite number of them in existence. It isn't more or less complicated that the Queen of England is intrinsically tied to one. The article does a disservice by leading with that. The primary confusion is just in the name of the entity "The Crown Estate" as both a concept and a registered entity, the concept of the Crown/Monarchy, and the personal private holdings of the Queen. But these can easily be abstracted away by simply re-labeling them in a chart and not acting like its that confusing.

ohazi 5y ago
Why does a trust like this not run afoul of the rule against perpetuities? [1] Is it because as long as there are living directors, they can technically vote to change the rules? Who would these directors for the Crown Estate be? The Queen? Parliament? A person at the top of the management chain? Is there an actual mechanism (other than tradition, good will, etc.) that prevents the entity managing/controlling the Crown Estate from voting to change the rules about how it's governed and who gets what proceeds? It seems that the answer to this question is that an act of Parliament could (probably?) change the rules, therefore it's not a perpetuity, and the share to the monarch is a tradition that they just aren't inclined to change right now. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities
- vmception 5y ago
  Why? Because that’s not a real law, its a creature of the courts and every time the legislature got involved it was to make a real law that abolishes any notion of the concept of limitations from your own article “Many jurisdictions have statutes that either cancel out the rule entirely or clarify it” The places that only clarified it have created lengths of time exceeding anyone. In the US some states made a length of time longer than the age of the nation itself UK areas having similarly long results or abolishing the notion

djrobstep 5y ago

It's very simple really - it's a government-owned sovereign wealth fund, with an unusual clause that 25% of the revenue goes to the Queen. In this context, "crown" means "government" more than "queen", eg "crown land" means "government land". If the UK ditched the monarchy, the government would continue to own this property, but keep the 25%.

denton-scratch 5y ago

100mill in used stamps? "And a FANTASTIC collection of stamps To win friends, and influence his uncle"

neilwilson 5y ago

They’re going to really get excited when they realise the crown estate is actually the whole of England and Wales (less the duchy of Cornwall iirc). The bit they are talking about is the residual that hasn’t had a “freehold” tenancy granted to some other person. You can’t hold land in England and Wales. The Crown owns it all. All you can hold is a heritable interest in land - an interest that returns to the Crown if you die Bono Vacantia.

martinflack 5y ago
I believe you're describing the sovereign holding "allodial title", which is (mostly) true in all jurisdictions deriving from English common law, including, for example, the US States (well, 49 of them), so it's not a practice constrained to England and Wales, or to monarchy. (But IANAL.) I think some US States had a feature where you could pay a fixed amount to satisfy all future property taxes, but I don't believe it relieved the possibility of eminent domain, escheat, or police power.

MomoXenosaga 5y ago

The English monarchy is very different from its European counterparts. They sadly never experienced the reformation of the French Revolution the ensuing Napoleonic wars and 1848.