UK royals can sacrifice more than Queen Victoria’s train

By Rosa Prince

When Queen Victoria first travelled by train in 1842 she marveled at its speed and comfort, describing the journey in her diary as “delightful and so quick.” By 1869, she was enamored enough by rail travel to order her very own royal train on which to tour the country.

A century and a half on, Victoria’s great-great-great grandson King Charles III has announced plans to mothball the royal choo-choo, after using it just twice in the last 12 months, at an average cost per trip of nearly £39,000 ($53,570). If the monarch regrets the loss of the train, elsewhere in the official royal accounts, published Tuesday, there’s news to put a smile on his face.

The financial reports for 2024-25 confirm that the UK royal family’s income from the sovereign grant, the main source of taxpayer funding for the royals, will temporarily leap for the next two years by more than £90 million to £132 million, an increase of 53 per cent in the space of 12 months. The generous hike was approved to cover some of the cost of a 10-year project to refurbish Charles’ principal residence, Buckingham Palace.

By coincidence, the figures were made public as Labour Members of Parliament prepared for a crunch vote on welfare reform, which had been due to see the amount paid to disabled people sharply reduced from next year. Ministers said the move was necessary as taxpayers can’t afford the spiraling welfare budget. The numbers claiming personal independence payments (PIPs), which the government is seeking to pare back, have surged by 55 per cent since the pandemic and are now paid to 1.75 million people.

Rebel MPs argued the cuts were untargeted and cruel, taking money from those who, for example, couldn’t wash below the waist or cook a meal unaided. The package passed only after the government agreed to delay changes to the eligibility criteria for PIPs until after the findings of a review slated for next year. The delay cost Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves savings of £5 billion she had counted on to balance the budget.

In the run-up to the vote, a series of measures were announced to try to win MPs over, including an extra £300 million into a fund to help disabled people into work. That’s less than the £369 million price tag of doing up Buckingham Palace, a sum that feels hard to justify given the straitened state of the UK’s finances.

I’ve written before that while polls suggest Brits are largely happy with their constitutional monarchy, the lack of transparency over the royals’ finances means they’re not really able to take an educated view of how much they consider appropriate for the taxpayer to spend to fund their lavish lifestyles.

The publication of the annual report is a case in point. The headline in virtually every media outlet was Charles’ decision to retire the royal train, which cost around £1 million a year to maintain and tens of thousands more on the rare occasions it was used, complete with winsome photographs of his late mother Queen Elizabeth II aboard the regal locomotive.

James Chalmers, who as keeper of the privy purse is responsible for the royal finances, said as he published the report: “[T]he time has come to bid the fondest of farewells, as we seek to be disciplined and forward-looking in out allocation of funding.” Rather than let the train take the strain, the royals will in future largely travel by car and helicopter and have in fact leased two choppers to help them get about, at a cost last year of £1.6 million, taking the overall royal travel bill to £4.7 million, the highest rate since the pandemic. Not so disciplined then.

The announcement that the royal train will be sent to the great depot in the sky is a classic “dead cat” strategy, the term coined by former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson to describe the effect of tossing an expired feline into the middle of a dinner table as a brutal but efficacious means of changing the conversation. Summoning up the nostalgia of royal rail journeys of yore means there’s little detailed discussion of the extent of taxpayer support for the royals. (The £132 million sovereign grant allocation was revealed by the House of Commons in May, but the accounts published by the royal household this week include a breakdown of spending.)

These latest accounts don’t reveal the full extent that the royal family benefits from perks such as free accommodation at their many palaces, castles and estates or being spared some taxes including inheritance tax. The king’s heir, Prince William, separately receives an income, of £22.8 million this year, from a quasi-private landholding called the Duchy of Cornwall — after public outrage, the Times reported he will no longer charge high rents to local Boy Scouts groups; however, he will continue to demand commercial rates from other public bodies, including the Ministry of Defence, to use the land.

The sums involved feel unedifying when placed alongside the real-life consequences of the measures being debated by MPs a mile from Buckingham Palace in the Palace of Westminster. The government’s own assessment estimated that 150,000 disabled people would have been forced into poverty as a result of its now-delayed cuts to PIPs.

Given that the price tag for renovating Buckingham Palace alone is the equivalent of a couple of thousand pounds for each of them, perhaps King Charles could mothball the royal residence along with his train and give his subjects a welcome cash prize instead. He’s got plenty of other palaces to choose from, after all.