Do the Queen and monarchy pay taxes in Britain?
She has always paid value added tax (equivalent of sales tax in the US) and local property taxes (the latter voluntarily). Prior to 1993 she paid no income tax, but since then she has paid income tax on her personal income (from property, investments, etc) on a voluntary basis.
A part of the grants she receives from the state are regarded as reimbursement for the cost of performing official duties and are not taxed; the rest is taxed.
Any property which passes to the next sovereign on her death will be free of inheritance tax; property passing to anyone else will be subject to inheritance tax in the usual way.
Since 1993, Wales has also paid income tax - again on a voluntary basis - on his (considerable) income from the estate of the Duchy of Cornwall. All his other income is subject to income tax in the usual way.
Other members of the royal family enjoy no exemptions from tax.
That’s a ‘voluntary basis’ means they’re doing it before someone kicked up an embarrassing fuss and made them do it like everyone else.
The ridiculous thing is that British Royalty used pay taxes, but somewhere along the line they ‘forgot’ and no-one thought to bring the matter up until 1993.
I wish people would leave the Queen alone. Maybe all the kids are loons, but Her Majesty has been an exemplary Queen. She has given her life over to her people, even from the time she was a little girl. She may well be earth’s last great Monarch. Treasure her.
My apologies. That post might not have been appropriate for General Questions.
:: treasures Queen ::
There you go.
There was an interesting TV prog on UK TV the subject a couple of years or so as the subject is rarely scrutinized . I think it was around the time Buck Palace decided it was good PR to publish details of it’s annual expenses.
It mentioned that the reason that the Queen used to pay taxes and didn’t from around the end of WW2 was because Winston Churchill was infatuated with the monarchy and the late Queen Mother particularly and so he made a deal that she wouldn’t have to lower herself by paying them and the exemption was continued.
Was there not some previous agreement that the revenues from certain royal properties were turned over to the government in lieu of personal taxes on the monarch?
No, you’re thinking of the 1760 deal by which George III surrendered most of the hereditary revenues (which included the rents from Crown lands) in return for a fixed income from Parliament.
It also needs to be realised that those earlier monarchs who did pay income tax only ever did so on a voluntary basis. In fact, until the reign of Victoria, British monarchs did not really have private incomes at all and there was some doubt as to whether it was even possible for that income to be ‘private’ if they did. It all depended on whether you thought that the monarch could be a private person. Victoria wanted to have it both ways, depending what suited her, but successive government and the Treasury also wanted it both ways, as the concept of royal privacy had the potential to be used as a weapon against government control of the royal finances. The idea that the monarch probably was, in some senses, a private person was never actually decided; it was more a case that it came to be taken for granted through an unwillingness all round to address the issue.
What everyone did agree was that the monarch could only be required to pay taxes if Parliament explicitly said so. This was because of the more general principle that no statute applies to the monarch unless that statute says so. As Victoria and Edward VII were willing to pay the taxes anyway, there was no need to clarify the point. The decisions by George V to stop paying income tax on his Civil List income and by George VI to stop paying income tax on his private income were not a matter of anyone ‘forgetting’ or being ‘infatuated’; in both cases, the Treasury did the deals in return for concessions on other points.