Buckingham Palace released their annual Sovereign Grant report at the end of June. This usually happens at the end of what Americans would call the second quarter of the year, but I think the British royal system uses July 1st-through-June 30 as their “business year.” In any case, there are three big stories coming out of this year’s SG report. One, the palace is officially decommissioning the Royal Train. Two, the amount of the SG will be vastly increased to £132 million in funding in 2026-27, and the reason for the huge sum is because of the massively profitable wind farms on the Crown Estate. Three, British taxpayers are getting much less bang for their buck in the form of fewer royal events and appearances.
The number of public engagements carried out by Britain’s royal family dropped sharply in the year leading up to March 2025, official documents showed, reflecting the effect of the cancer diagnoses of two of its most prominent members, King Charles III and Catherine, the Princess of Wales. Members of the monarchy undertook more than 1,900 engagements in Britain and abroad in total, according to the sovereign grant report, a yearly accounting document from Buckingham Palace that was published on Monday.
That is significantly fewer than the 2,300 events they attended in the previous year, a number that was well below the 3,200 official engagements managed by Queen Elizabeth II and her family before the coronavirus pandemic.
Despite the health difficulties of senior members of the royal family, the document stressed that the monarchy’s regular routine of outreach and engagements continued. More than 93,000 guests attended 828 events at royal palaces during the 12-month period, it said.
“Soft power is hard to measure, but its value is, I believe, now firmly understood at home and abroad as the core themes of the new reign have come into even sharper focus,” James Chalmers, who has overall responsibility for the management of the monarch’s financial affairs, said in a statement accompanying the sovereign grant report.
Among other details that emerged from the report was a decision to decommission the royal family’s dedicated train, which was used by members of the monarchy for journeys in the country and was part of the family’s storied history. The current royal train came into service for Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee, in 1977, and, in addition to a dining car, has sitting rooms, bedrooms and bathrooms. Its use is costly, however, and is thought to be about four times as expensive as traveling by plane. A review of the train’s future was begun after Queen Elizabeth’s death, in 2022, the first indication that its future was in doubt.
A separate report, the Crown Estate’s annual results, showed that offshore wind generation projects helped to increase the royal family’s finances for the second consecutive year. Profits from the Crown Estate, which overseas the family’s huge land and real estate holdings, stayed constant at £1.1 billion ($1.5 billion), the document showed, with much of the money coming from the leasing of seabed sites to offshore wind producers.
In 2024-25, the royal family received £86.3 million ($118.4 million) from the sovereign grant, although it is expected to rise to £132 million ($181 million) next year.
The government should put a cap on the Sovereign Grant. I’m pretty sure that the government uses percentages, as in a certain “percentage” of the Crown Estate profits will always make up the SG. They need to cap it, especially with fewer working royals and a monarchy being vastly slimmed-down before our eyes. That being said, the government is apparently allowing the SG to remain so high because of the math involved with the Buckingham Palace refurbishment, a ten-year project which costs in excess of $1 billion. Some of the costs have to be paid through the Sovereign Grant, but it’s purposefully fuzzy about who pays for what and when. Anyway… I don’t even believe that the Windsors carried out 1,900 engagements in the past year. How many of those engagements were “private meetings” and “emails”?
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid, Cover Images.
