The Prince Andrew/Royal Lodge fiasco has metastasized to the point where reporters are now questioning Prince Edward and Sophie’s Bagshot Park lease. Edward and Sophie, aka the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh, have lived in Bagshot Park since 2003. Bagshot is another enormous, palatial estate with a Crown Estates lease, and the terms of the lease are being hidden from journalists and the government, it seems. The Times reports that Edward “paid market rate” for his lease initially, but the details dug up by the Times seem to indicate that Edward and Sophie’s lease is quite unconventional as well, just like Prince Andrew’s Royal Lodge lease.
The Duke of Edinburgh paid the market rate for his royal residence while his brother Prince Andrew was contracted to pay only “one peppercorn, if demanded” for Royal Lodge. Details from a National Audit Office report show that while the King’s youngest brother, Edward, had to pay a “market value” for his Surrey residence, Bagshot Park, until at least 2007, Andrew never did.
Last week The Times revealed that Andrew paid no rent on the 30-room Windsor property after contributing £8.5 million to refurbishments having taken over the lease in 2003, with this constituting a significant taxpayer subsidy on its true worth.
In a further twist, the key details of Edward’s lease after it was renewed in 2007 were redacted on the Land Registry, making it impossible to establish whether he continued to pay a market rent.
Edward was reported to have extended the lease to 150 years for £5 million in 2007. Despite releasing an unredacted copy of Andrew’s lease, the Crown Estate refused to disclose Edward’s at the 51-acre Bagshot Park, his residence for more than 25 years.
The mansion is grade II listed and was built between 1875 and 1879 on instructions from Queen Victoria as a home for her third son, Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught and Strathearn. Edward, who inherited the title of Duke of Edinburgh after his father Prince Philip’s death, initially leased the property for 50 years for £5,000 a year in March 1998.
Unlike Royal Lodge, the Crown Estate received two alternative offers for Bagshot Park, one for the establishment of a conference centre and another to convert the property into a hotel, after the Ministry of Defence handed back its lease on the site in 1996. The sum later went up to £90,000 a year — described as “market value” — after Edward paid £1.36 million to help renovate the property, with the Crown Estate covering the rest of the £3 million refurbishment costs.
The Crown Estate’s profits are passed on to the benefit of the taxpayer and spending on matters of questionable public benefit have come under scrutiny after The Times revealed Andrew had been living at Royal Lodge on such favourable terms. However, redactions to the lease mean that the public are not allowed to know how much Edward now pays in rent.
As well as redacting the rent paid under the lease, the amount paid to extend the lease was also obscured, as was a section of the tenant’s covenants that would indicate if the rent paid from 2007 would be peppercorn.
On a technical level, I get the impression that royals in particular can simply negotiate favorable terms with the Crown Estates, and the Crown Estates are heavily influenced by whatever the monarch wants. None of this is straightforward because these are just long-term leases rather than purchases. Despite the Times declaring that Edward absolutely paid “market rent” for a few years at one time, it sounds like Edward renegotiated extremely favorable terms on Bagshot in 2007, and I doubt he and Sophie are paying much of anything on their lease. Similar to Andrew (perhaps even more so in this case), questions should be asked about how Edward and Sophie even had the money to make lump-sum payments for renovations and lease extensions. I strongly suspect that QEII was just paying for everything, right? She was funnelling money to both Andrew and Edward pretty consistently for their homes and upkeep.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
