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The Committee’s recorded proceedings continued on similarly radical lines. The Prince
of Wales should be given a salary and deprived of the revenues of the Duchy of
Cornwall. It was a misconception, the Committee declared, that the Duchy was a private
estate. The Revolution of 1688 had transformed the contract between the monarchy and
Parliament and therefore the monarch’s former private estates thereafter ceased to be
their private estates. ‘No royal personage should be entitled to the total proceeds of
what has become a public estate,’ they declared. Furthermore, when it came to the
Crown Estate, handed over to the Government by George III in 1760 and used as
justification for the public funding of the Civil List, the Committee described its links to
the monarchy as ‘tenuous, dating back to the plunder which followed the Norman
Conquest’. In view of this, they continued, ‘the charade enacted at the beginning of each
new reign, when the Monarch is presumed to hand over all claims to the revenues from
the Crown Lands in exchange for a Civil List, should be ended’. Their recommendation
was that the Crown Estate, with the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall, should be
jointly administered as ‘the Public Estates’ to save costs of duplication and their income
accrue direct to the Consolidated Fund.
They tackled the question of the Queen’s immunity from taxation, regretting that
more precise information on the value of the tax-free private income had not been
provided. Such information would be ‘clearly relevant to any reconsideration of the size
and value of the Civil List, since the private fortune must have been accumulated in very
large measure by virtue of the uniquely favourable treatment in respect of all forms of
taxation’. Their conclusion, prompted by Mr Hamilton, was defiant to the point of
rudeness:
Your Committee may have received much information previously unknown. A great deal still remains
shrouded in mystery. What is abundantly clear, however, is that considering the enormous scale of the tax
[remission] granted to the Royal Family, the Gracious Message of May 19 1971, represented the most
insensitive and brazen pay claim made in the last two hundred years.
Their final recommendations, had they been carried out, would have represented the
greatest revolution in the relationship between sovereign and Parliament since 1688.
They included: abandonment of the term ‘Civil List’ in favour of ‘Expenditure on the
Royal Family’ under which all payments to individual members of the royal family
would be shown; Elizabeth to be paid an annual salary of £100,000, salaries of Her
Majesty’s household to be put on the Treasury vote, and household expenses on a new
vote with an additional £80,000 for postal and telecommunications services; the Queen
Mother’s annuity to be reduced to the equivalent of a retired prime minister’s pension;
Philip’s annuity to be reduced to £20,000 a year and his separate household to be
abolished; Anne’s present annuity to be retained, but its automatic increase to £15,000
on marriage to be abolished and the situation reviewed when necessary; Margaret’s and
the Duke of Gloucester’s annuities were to be abolished and payments to other members
of the royal family were to be made out of the £100,000 provided for the Queen; the
Prince of Wales was to be paid a salary not greater than the Prime Minister and his