King Charles is in line for a bumper £45m pay rise, a 50 per cent increase on last year’s packet, thanks to sky-high profit booked by the Crown Estate.
The body, which owns vast swathes of agricultural land, city freeholds and almost all the UK’s seabed, raked in a record £1.1bn in profit according to filings released today, up from just £442.6m last year.
Much of this was down to the lucrative work the estate has done relating to offshore wind projects, which its capacity as owner of the sea bed permits it to auction off rights to develop wind farms off the British coast.
As part of the agreement to return the estate into government ownership, a deal was struck between the Treasury and the royal family which saw the monarch retain roughly 12 per cent of the profit, with the rest of the revenue siphoned off to the exchequer.
The growing revenue it accrued from the burgeoning offshore wind sector has helped provide the Treasury with an additional £4bn across the past decade, the estate’s CEO said; enough to fund the Ministry of Justice for roughly five months.
The estate’s revenue has the potential to increase further still, thanks to measures laid out in the latest King’s Speech, which will allow the Estate to borrow money, in the hope it will make capital easier to come by. It also freed up restrictions on its ability to invest.
Dan Labbad, the chief executive of the Crown Estate, said: “Today’s record results are the product of years of commitment and investment into helping create the UK’s world-leading offshore wind sector.”
Elsewhere in the filings, the Crown Estate’s portfolio – which as well as the seabed includes the freehold of almost all of Regent Street, 200,000 acres of land and roughly 8m square foot of commercial development space outside of London – was valued at £14bn.