Buckingham Palace is
to undergo a 10-year refit at a cost of £370m. The Queen has been
awarded a 66% raise to fund the refurbishment in her annual grant. It
was agreed by Theresa May and Philip Hammond that it was necessary to
grant the funding to avoid the ‘catastrophic building failure’
palace officials warned could happen. The Queen will remain in
residence as the work is done
John
McDonnell backs revamp of Buckingham Palace as petition grows
Shadow
chancellor says ‘national monument’ must be repaired but petition
calls for royal family to pay £369m bill
Peter J Walker and
agencies
Saturday 19 November
2016 18.36 GMT
The shadow
chancellor, John McDonnell, has backed the publicly funded £369m
refurbishment of Buckingham Palace.
The republican
Labour MP declared the Queen’s main residence a national monument
and said no government would allow it to fall into disrepair.
“It’s a national
monument ... national heritage. It’s going to be treated that way,
in the same way as the House of Commons. When you have these old
buildings they have to be looked after,” McDonnell told LBC radio.
Asked if the Queen
should pay for the work, instead of the money coming from a 66%
increase in the sovereign grant, he said: “She may well consider
that. I am a republican, but when it comes to decisions like that I
think they are left to her.”
The Treasury
announced a 66% increase in the annual sovereign grant on Friday to
meet the cost of the 10-year refit, which will include the
replacement of decades-old electrical wiring, lead piping and boilers
at the central London palace.
An online petition
urging the royal family to fund the refurbishment of the palace
privately has collected more than 50,000 signatures in less than 24
hours.
Mark Johnson said in
his petition, addressed to the chancellor, Philip Hammond, that the
royal family should pay for the revamp themselves.
A copywriter and
former journalist, he said it was the first time he had done anything
like this, but that he had been outraged by the timing of the news.
“I am all for
protecting Buckingham Palace, but at a time when the public purse is
so pressured, and on a day that temperatures dropped overnight, when
the elderly are freezing in their homes and children have damp mould
on their bedroom walls, to fund it publicly is something out of a
Charles Dickens novel,” he said.
”It’s up to the
royal household how they fund it privately, I don’t think it will
be hard to find the money, not as hard as it would be for the NHS to
fund.”
The crown estate,
not including inherited private residences such as Sandringham House
and Balmoral Castle, is worth £11bn and made a £304m profit in its
most recent financial year.
One petition
signatory wrote: “This decision spits in the face of the majority
of people in this country.”
The occupied royal
palaces are held in trust for the nation and are not owned by the
Queen, with the cost of maintaining them borne by the taxpayer.
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Whitehall claimed it
earned a multibillion-pound boost from the 500,000 people who visited
Buckingham Palace during the summer and the millions who came to see
the changing of the guard.
The fire at Windsor
Castle in 1992 resulted in a five-year restoration, the Treasury
said, and rectifying similar damage to the palace would cost up to
£250m for a single wing.
The sovereign grant
for the royal family is equal to 15% of the crown estate’s annual
profits, which were £45.6m most recently. This will increase to a
25% share until the renovation finishes in 2027, after which it will
revert to the lower amount.
A Treasury spokesman
said: “If there was a fire, it would cost the taxpayer a lot more
than this and the grant is not for the royal family’s personal
use.”
When asked why the
renovation could not be funded by private assets, he pointed out that
the duchy of Cornwall’s revenue already went to private charities,
adding: “The monarchy can’t sell property because it’s managed
by the crown estate commissioners.”
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