How the royals spent £3.9million on foreign trips last year

The most expensive journey made by any Royal Family member over the last financial year was Charles and Camilla’s charter flight to Rwanda – costing £186,571.

The King and Queen attended a Commonwealth leaders’ summit in Kigali in June last year, when they were known as Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall.

The couple flew from Brize Norton in Oxfordshire in an RAF Voyager to meet prime ministers and presidents at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.

His visit was notable for him telling leaders that keeping the British monarch as head of state or becoming a republic was ‘a matter for each member country to decide’.

The trip ran from June 21 to 25 – and the total sum also paid for the King to travel from Brize Norton to Aberdeen on the day of his return, and for a staff planning visit from Heathrow to Nairobi in Kenya, Kigali and Doha in Qatar between May 2 to 8.

It comes as new royal accounts showed royal travel costs have fallen by £600,000 to £3.9million, but the expenditure on helicopter flights has topped £1million. 

The second priciest journey in the financial year was Charles and Camilla’s £146,219 three-day trip to Germany in March this year for the first state visit of his new reign.

After again travelling from Brize Norton in a Voyager, they visited Hamburg and Berlin as Charles became the first UK monarch to address the German parliament.

The third most expensive trip was Prince Edward and Sophie’s seven-day Platinum Jubilee tour to the Caribbean which saw them visit Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Saint Lucia.

But their visit, which saw the couple use London Gatwick Airport, was marked by anti-colonial protests and calls for slavery reparations.

The total cost of the trip was £85,069 which also included staff planning visits to the region over the same period.

In fourth place was Princess Anne and her husband Sir Timothy Lawrence’s visit to Sydney and Papua New Guinea in April last year, which came in at £51,108.

Fifth was Prince William and Kate’s trip from London Heathrow to Boston in the US in November last year to attend an awards ceremony for the Earthshot Prize, costing £48,034.

Behind that was the £43,335 spent on trips by Charles and Camilla following Queen Elizabeth II’s death in September last year, including to Edinburgh and Belfast where they attended various ceremonies and receptions. 

And in seventh place was the £40,902 it cost for the late Queen Elizabeth II to travel to her Scottish residence Balmoral in May last year, which saw her use RAF Northolt in West London to go to and from Aberdeen Airport.

There were also a number of residence to residence chartered flights made by Charles.

One taken from Aberdeen to Northolt last October cost £25,687, while another with Camilla, travelling from Northolt to Aberdeen in September, cost £23,164.

A large number of trips were taken by helicopter, 179 journeys in total, during 2022-23, but their details are not listed as they fall below a £17,000 cost threshold.

The information was released in the Sovereign Grant annual report on royal finances for 2022-23, which listed major royal trips.

During a briefing for last year accounts a source said Charles is ‘pretty allergic’ to travelling by helicopter and will always ‘raise an eyebrow’ and object when the mode of transport is suggested.

The drop in travel costs for 2022-23 may in part be explained by a fall in the number of overseas trips.

A Buckingham Palace spokesman said: ‘We also saw a 43 per cent decrease in business travel emissions, largely due to the reduced number of overseas visits requested by Government this year.’ 

The report also showed the King used the royal train in January, travelling from Ayr to Manchester to carry out a string of engagements at both locations over two days at a cost of £31,571.

Asked about the future of the royal train a Buckingham Palace spokesman said: ‘Once we determine what the future usage will be we’d be in a position to consider plans for a timetable for decommissioning.’

Also in the royal accounts, it was revealed that  the heating has been turned down at Buckingham Palace and other royal homes to cut emissions, reflecting the King’s green credentials.

Guests, staff and the royal family were living with temperatures set at 19C during the winter and a few degrees lower when rooms were empty.

Charles spoke extensively before becoming King about the importance of the environment, tackling climate change and protecting wildlife, and even recycled his Clarence House bathwater and runs his Aston Martin on sustainable fuel.

Sovereign Grant accounts show Charles has begun his reign with royal expenditure, funded by the taxpayer, rising for the second year running.

The figure for net expenditure increased by £5.1million, or 5 per cent, to £107.5 million for 2022-23, which royal aides said was due to the change of monarchs, inflation and the continued costs of Buckingham Palace’s reservicing programme, a 10-year project to update the electrical cabling, plumbing and heating.

The Sovereign Grant remained unchanged at £86.3million during 2022/23.

A core element of £51.8 million funds the King’s official duties and his household – equivalent to 77p per person in the UK – and an additional £34.5million pays for ongoing reservicing costs for the palace.

The royal household has failed again to meet its diversity target, set in 2021, of drawing 10 per cent of its workforce from ethnic minorities, with the 2023 figure of 9.7 per cent the same as last year.

Payroll costs was one of the biggest annual increases of any expenditure during 2022-23, rising £3.4million to 27.1million, with staff given a pay rise of about 5 to 6 per cent, and the workforce increased to pre-pandemic levels as royal activities picked up after the lockdowns.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s vacation of Frogmore Cottage was officially confirmed by a Buckingham Palace spokesman.

But they would not speculate on the next tenant, with reports claiming the disgraced Duke of York is resisting a downsizing move from his Royal Lodge home to Harry and Meghan’s former home.

Sir Michael Stevens, Keeper of the Privy Purse, said the past 12 months had been ‘a year of grief, change and celebration, the like of which our nation has not witnessed for seven decades’.

He added: ‘These past 12 months have taken us from the Platinum Jubilee in the summer of last year, to the sadness of the death of Queen Elizabeth and the accession of our new sovereign in the autumn, via an incoming and outgoing state visit and many months of work in preparation for the coronation of their majesties King Charles and Queen Camilla in the spring of this year.’

There was a mixed picture for expenditure in other areas, with housekeeping and hospitality up from £1.3million to £2.4million, and property maintenance falling £6.1million to £57.8million.

The Sovereign Grant document reported on the royal household’s sustainability efforts, highlighting a number of initiatives including: ‘A concerted effort to reduce occupied room set points to 19C during the winter, as well as educate staff to turn down the temperature in vacant rooms to 16C and be more aware of the potential for reducing heat loss.’

A palace spokesman said ‘His majesty has obviously supported the strategic direction of the royal households in its attempts to achieve net zero.’

He added: ‘In the short term though, it is all about reducing our emissions where we can control our emissions and in adjusting room temperatures, whether that’s during the working week or whether that’s a limiting of the effect of heating on weekends.

‘Or whether it’s turning off the gas lamps where it’s safe to do so, as a precursor to changing them over to electric operation, or indeed if it’s the case of turning the heating off on the swimming pool – these are all areas which are about the steps that we can take to reduce our emissions.’

The report showed £1.6million was spent on the Queen’s funeral and events around the ceremony, which included paying for engagements at Buckingham Palace and staff costs and travel, said a palace spokesman.

A further £700,000 was spent by the royal household on the Platinum Jubilee.

The Queen’s former private secretary Lord Young, who stayed on as joint principal private secretary to the King to help the transition from one monarch to another, received a compensation payment of £145,000-£150,000, on top of his £200,000 – £205,000 salary, after stepping down in May.

The King and Queen plan to use the late Queen’s private apartments at Buckingham Palace when refurbishment works are completed there, a Palace official said.

‘It is currently the intention that their majesties will occupy the private apartments of her late majesty at the end of the reservicing programme. And at this point, I’m not in a position to speculate on the future of Clarence House,’ he said.

Work is still to be undertaken on the Palace’s North Wing, and with a timescale of 18 months needed to ‘decant’ this part of the palace, with 70,000 objects having to be moved to a temporary home.

This will be followed by two years of construction on the North Wing, with the full building work project expected to be finished in 2027.

Separate financial information relating to the Prince of Wales was also released, showing William received a private income of nearly £6million from the Duchy of Cornwall, but was criticised for not publishing an annual report in his first year as heir to the throne.

Graham Smith, chief executive of Republic, which campaigns for an elected head of state, criticised the rise in royal expenditure as the country experienced a cost-of-living crisis.

He said: ‘Charles has suggested he’s concerned about, and aware of, the cost-of-living crisis and yet he seems completely oblivious to his need to reduce costs and they continue to go up and up, whilst public services are being squeezed.

‘Really they should be slashing the budget by tens of millions of pounds, not increasing it by £5million.’