What the royal family costs us

What price the monarchy? Are we getting a good deal or is the royal family just an expensive tourist attraction? Simon Wilson reports.

What does the royal family cost us?

Each year, when the Keeper of the Privy Purse (the queen's chief accountant) releases details of the royal finances, he traditionally compares the cost per person to a pint of milk, or a loaf of bread. But last year, he gave us a precise figure: the royals cost us 62p each a year (in 2009-2010) £38.2m in all. Of that, £7.9m is the Civil List money provided by Parliament to let the queen discharge her duties as head of state. A further £7m is Civil List money left in reserve from years past. This covers the royal household's current running expenses everything from salaries and pensions for 450 staff (£10.3m last year) to garden parties, investitures and public engagements in Britain and abroad.

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Simon Wilson’s first career was in book publishing, as an economics editor at Routledge, and as a publisher of non-fiction at Random House, specialising in popular business and management books. While there, he published Customers.com, a bestselling classic of the early days of e-commerce, and The Money or Your Life: Reuniting Work and Joy, an inspirational book that helped inspire its publisher towards a post-corporate, portfolio life.   

Since 2001, he has been a writer for MoneyWeek, a financial copywriter, and a long-time contributing editor at The Week. Simon also works as an actor and corporate trainer; current and past clients include investment banks, the Bank of England, the UK government, several Magic Circle law firms and all of the Big Four accountancy firms. He has a degree in languages (German and Spanish) and social and political sciences from the University of Cambridge.