The Royals with Roya and Kate - Is William being forced to open up about royal money?

Episode Date: May 20, 2026

As scrutiny grows over royal wealth, property and privilege, Roya Nikkhah and Kate Mansey ask whether Prince William is becoming more transparent about royal finances – or being pushed into openness. They examine new details about the Prince and Princess of Wales’s annual rent at Forest Lodge, The Sunday Times’s reporting on William’s tax bill, and the ripple effect of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s peppercorn rent deal at Royal Lodge. Will Humphries, southwest and countryside correspondent forThe Times, joins to explain his investigation into changes at the Duchy of Cornwall, from tenant farmers in Devon to William’s plans to sell off part of the estate and invest in housing, renewable energy and communities.Get in touch: [e-mail]: GettyProducer: Robert WallaceExecutive Producer: Priyanka DeladiaRead more: Inside the £1bn property empires of King Charles and William Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello and welcome to the Royals, the podcast where we go behind Palace walls. I'm Roy Nicar. And I'm Kate Mancy. This week, we're looking into the Prince of Wales's finances and asking whether the future king is becoming a more transparent member of the royal family. Last week, the Times revealed that the Prince and Princess of Wales were paying £300,000 a year in rent on Forest Lodge. And they made that figure public through the documents they registered for the home. It came soon after another rare glimpse into the Prince's finances with the Sunday Times revealing William pays between 5 million and 7 million pounds of tax

on his personal income from the Duchy of Cornwall profits. Now, and another major shake-up, the Duchy is selling off a fifth of its land and it's going to reinvest the £500 million it gets into new projects of regeneration and helping communities. So is this the beginning of a more open monarchy under William? Or did he jump or will, well, he pushed. Has a future king been forced towards more transparency after a public outcry over Andrew Mountbatten, Windsor's Peppercorn Rent deal? Well, there's lots of questions to ask there about money matters in the monarchy and a few questions on the Duchy of Cornwall 2 and later

on the episode will be talking to Will Humphreys. He is the Times' Southwest and countryside correspondent. But first, let's look at a story Kate you did last week about Forest Lodge, which is William and Kate's newish home, which they moved to a while ago from Adelaide Cottage on the Windsor Estate. Yeah. But it's bigger. It's better. They said they wanted to be their forever home. And you revealed last week that they are now paying £307,500 a year in rental income.

That figure's been made public by registering the document. Tell us a little bit more about why that has come about and a little bit more about how that figure has come about. Well, land registry likes to work in kind of fairly mysterious ways, but William has basically given the nod that he's happy for that lease to be registered with the land registry. And that's why we can now access the documents because they've finally been put out there about the property that they moved into, if you remember, last July. So this is a huge place. They've called it their forever home. But actually, it's a 20-year lease. One assumes that they're going to renew that lease when the time comes out.

and it shows that they're spending $307,000 a year on rent. Now, what's there? What is that Forest Lodge? Well, that's interesting. So I've found another document, which has a bit more detail on it. So they've got this main mansion, if you like. They've got tennis courts. And they've also got three cottages within the ground.

So that rental covers the whole thing. So there's about £70,000 a year that goes on those three cottages. Now, the lease stipulates that they can't have their mates moving in there. It has to be accommodation for staff and security. And it also says that lease can only be for Kate William and their three children to live at the house. They have to obviously look after it like any tenant would have to. They've got to make sure the weeds don't grow in the garden. Hilariously, that's written into the formal agreement that William and Catherine have signed.

But also they can leave it to the children as well, which is interesting, I think, because it shows you of their kind of long-term plan for this property, you know, the forever home. Now, everyone has around this property deal has said that there were three different estate agents that looked at the house and said, look, this is how much the market rate would be. And indeed, William's paying £100,000 a year more than the previous tenants who lived there. £300,000 is an awful lot of money. But this is an enormous house on a prime bit of real estate. it's huge. I'm not a property expert, but that seems low.

£300,000 for an enormous house in three cottages a year. So you break it down to about £25,000 a month. Well, I know somebody who's renting a property in London that's just a one-bedroom house. And that's about £5,000 a month. So when you put it into perspective and you pick up this huge mansion, it's out in Windsor and a rarefied address, and there's three cottages, I mean, some people might say it's still relatively cheap for him. Certainly, it's not a big chunk off his income at more than 20 million pounds a year.

Those three independent valuations, have they been made public out of interest? Well, the result of it is this figure. But the back and forth between that hasn't been made public. So two different estate agents were operating on behalf of the Crown Estate. Which owns the property. Yeah, that's essentially Williams' landlord, if you like. Now, the Crown Estate, if people don't know, is this huge body of land across the country and their profits feed into the exchequer.

So they go back into the public purse. So that's why there's so much interest into the property deals that the Crown Estate does with the Royal Family, because ultimately the money the Crown Estate earns goes back into the public coffers. And this all became even more interesting because of the former Prince Andrews lease arrangement with the Crown Estate over Royal Lodge. Everything goes back these days at the moment to the former Prince Andrew. The intense scrutiny on the monarchy is a lot to do with what has gone on with Andrew Mountbatten, Windsor, because the Royal Lodge deal, which came out in the Times last year that he had, yes, he had paid a lump sum of, I think, seven or eight million pounds to refurbish it before

he moved in. But then he was paying a peppercorn rate on Royal Lodge. And that, when that came out in the Times, created a huge amount of controversy, didn't it? And it prompted the Public Accounts Committee to launch a public inquiry into the Crown Estates dealings with the royal family and lease arrangements, the whole family. So it makes you wonder, is this, you know, William going, hey, this is how much I'm paying £300,000 plus? Is he trying to get everything in order, do you think, and show that he's being much more transparent than some other members of his family? I think it's somewhere in between. He's reading the room, is Prince William, and he's sort of saying, look, I get it. I'm listening.

And he is quite thoughtful. He's somebody who takes things on board. You can see that when we go on jobs with him. You know, he looks, he listens. And everybody says, he listens. He listens before he speaks. He is kind of taking the temperature of the nation, I think, with this and saying, we've got to do something.

We've got to kind of change our tune here. And I think, to his credit, it's changing. Now, the battles that we went through at the time to try to get that Andrew Leith was extraordinary. And it was like getting blood out of a stone. We got there in the end. But for a while, even the rent deal was redacted from it. It was only after much, much pushing and pushing and pushing that we did actually find out that for two decades he was paying a peppercorn rent. And for anybody who doesn't know, that means if it's asked for, you can give a peppercorn as your rent.

But of course he had paid a lump sum in advance. That's interesting because, you know, William let it be known that these documents were being registered. He was okay for the times to see that information in a way that previous members of the little family. Well, I don't think it let it be known. I mean, it is just a public document. Yeah. So it's there. You can go and look it up.

Anyone can look it up. You don't have to be a journalist. But they didn't have to register it, did they? Well, that's it. They didn't have to register it. But he has chosen to make that public by registering it. So if anybody has searches on those properties, as journalists, you can see when new documents come onto the properties. And you can see when new things flag up.

And as a result of that, you can see quite a lot of information if it's made available. Now, the question should be, why wasn't Andrewsley's lease made available? It should be a standard. It shouldn't be Williams giving a nod and saying yes to the land registry. You can put that on the public database. It shouldn't need to be. It should just be, you know, all those arguably. And I think this will all come out.

I think we're moving into an era with more transparency. And what do you think? What do you think about it? Do you think it's a good move? Do you think actually you should be paying more? Well, I mean, I'm not a property expert, so I don't know whether he should be paying more. I think, you know, it's interesting how that figure came in. Those documents were registered and they're there in the public domain.

I think with the Sunday Times getting the tax figure out of William on the Duchy of Cornwall, that felt dragged because, I mean, that was not made publicly available. He hasn't disclosed that for the last few years. That was something that Sunday Times kind of dug away on and did a lot of arithmetic and kept putting it to him. So you wonder why, I wonder why, I read that and think, okay, those documents have been put into the public domain. But something like tax is not put in the public domain, whereas previously Charles did. So I think my feeling is, if you want to be much more transparent, be much more transparent about everything. I think he's going to have to – well, when we have the Duchy of Cornwall accounts briefing in the summer, we're going to find out, aren't we, if he's decided again to withhold the figure of tax that he's paying or if he's going to reveal it. Now, if it's true that he really is moving to this more kind of transparent operation, then come out and say it.

Now, I can think of a reason why he hasn't wanted to give his tax figure over. If indeed he's paying five to seven million, why not just announce it? But if you remember, when the Prince of Wales announced, as was now the king, when Charles said how much he taxed he was paying, it was a kind of a breakdown because you take the tax off what you take home, essentially. But before you get to that point, you can deduct any reasonable costs for your office. So we saw from Prince Charles, as was, how much he was spending on his public office, including, you know, embarrassingly at one point, Camilla's grooming costs. Clothes and things, yes.

And haircuts and things like that. We saw all of that. Then we saw the take-home figure that Charles got and that was a figure that he paid tax on. And then we could see the figure of the tax that he paid. Now, if William were to do that, he's going to have to show how much he spends on his office, ultimately. So maybe that's the reason why he hasn't so far. wanted to disclose that. But I think he's going to be in a bit of a tricky position to kind of keep that,

keep his mouth shut on that. Well, all eyes will be on that to see. We're in that five to seven million ballpark it may land. We don't know, but it'll be, we'll certainly be asking a lot more questions. And that's the issue, isn't it? People are just asking a lot more questions now. The Andrew Mountbatten Windsor controversy, the revelations that came out about Royal Lodge, it has just made everyone ask a lot more questions about these things, these arrangements,

these cozy arrangements are going on for a very long time. Why? How should they continue as they are? And I think, I suppose William is probably thinking, looking far into the future thinking, let's try and address some of those questions before more and more are asked. This is a kind of ripple effect, isn't it? Yeah. Of the Andrews scandal.

Yeah. It's one of them. Yeah. This is kind of spreading out to the rest of the royal family, whether they like it or not. I suppose this is a difficult question and a fine line to draw between a very public family, you know, effectively the first family of the UK, head of state, his children, public figures with private lives who feel entitled to a certain amount of privacy, whether that's over medical privacy, financial privacy, how much should they or ought they have to disclose and how much

should be kept private? But I think if you want to be seen to be modern and more transparent, you're not need to just only address things like finances. What about the fact that royal wills are sealed? And again, it comes down to what's public, what's private. There is always such a fine line, isn't there between public wealth and private wealth when it comes to the royal family? Well, there's this kind of cloak of secrecy, isn't there? And is this the point at which it's unveiled? And is William going to be bold enough to do that? Is he going to rip it off?

You know, I think there's a lot riding on his shoulders, I think, with this. Because what he does now will set the tone not just for his reign, but the reign of Prince George and whoever comes after that. Yeah, I think if you're going to do it, fully do it. Don't do any half-mashes. There you go, William. There's my advice. That's great advice.

Take you to leave it. Come on the podcast. Coming up, what does the Dutchy diversifying to tackle climate change and the housing crisis actually mean? Now, to dig into William's land estate, we're joined by Will Humphreys, the Times is Southwest and Countryside correspondent who's been digging into these deals.

Will, welcome to the Royals. Thanks for joining us. Welcome. Thanks for having me. So the question on the other William, Prince William, Why do you think we are learning all of this now, Will? It seems like a lot of information that people have been trying to get out of William and his finances for quite a long time. He's been very reluctant to discuss, talk about.

For the last few years not revealed what income tax he'd paid on the Duchy, which the previous Duke of Cornwall Charles had. We've learned about his tax after lots of questions from Sunday times. We've learned via Kate about the rent on Forest Lodge. Why are we getting all of this information all of a sudden? Yeah, I mean, there seems like lots of things are starting to come to ahead. We've had in the last couple of years, really, a lot of revelations about how the royal finances are kept, the sort of drip feed of things coming out.

And I see that Prince William is maybe wanting to get ahead of that and start to sort of give a bit more information. Not the whole lot. We still don't know really what he takes from the Duchy of Cornwall before he decides to pay tax on it. He can use a lot of it for expenses without us knowing. So there's still lots of questions that we don't know. answers to. But there is sort of now, I feel like they're starting to try and meet these questions head on rather than just constantly be reactive to it. But that's interesting, isn't it? You've hit upon something about where we're at right now. I mean, it kind of speaks

to the zeitgeist because for a long time we've known about the Duchy of Lancaster, the Duchy of Cornwall. Obviously, Duchy of Lancaster providing an income for the king, Duchy of Cornwall traditionally providing an income for the heir to the throne. But it seems all of a sudden we're having so many more questions about what role these should have in the state. I mean, you're coming at it from the outside. You're coming at it from a genit. He's not part of the royal beat like we are. Do you think this is a kind of a turning point? Well, yeah, you're right. I mean, I'm not normally involved in many royal stories, but the reason that I've sort of become involved in this is because William has started to do more with the Duchy. I mean, he took over when Charles became

king and he became the heir. So he took over control of the Duke of Cornwall and the Dutch. And after a couple of years of getting his feet under the table, he's now starting to make some real big changes. And we, the public, are going to notice those. You know, pieces of land are being sold off. Investments are being made. And if you are going to start doing lots of things with this big private state and we notice it, then questions are going to be asked about, well, do we agree that that's right? Do we think he should be making these changes? And the things that William's getting involved in, you know, some people won't agree with them.

and it's going to raise questions? Well, they didn't, did they? I mean, take us back to the story that you ran, first of all, which kind of revealed a lot of what was going on at the Duchy and has kind of forced the Duchy of Cornwall and Williams team to respond. Tell us about what you found out. Yeah, so back in March, we were contacted the Times by people on the Bradninch estate down in Devon saying, did we know that the Duchy had just told 10 tenant farmers on the estate

that they were going to be no longer part of the Duchy. They were being sold off. it came as a massive shock to these tenant farmers. Some of the farms have been in multi-generational ownership and villagers as well have been very proud members of the Duchy. It's been part of the Duchy since 1337 this area. So we then started digging into what was going on because there were rumours of a mass wholesale sell-off of land

across the whole Duchy going through the village. So we had to look into this and say, you know, is this really true? It seems a bit fanciful. And what we discovered was no, it was right, there were 10 farms being sold. And once we went to the Dutchie and said, look, there are very concerned farmers here and villages, scared that they're just being sort of thrown to the market forces. The Dutchie then had to sort of come clean and say, well, this is part of a new thing we are doing.

And maybe we need to start telling people about it if people are going to start reporting on it. What has been the sort of raison dutch from the Duchy of Cornwall from Will Bax, the chief executive who took over helping William to run it a couple of years ago? Because it feels like there's been a bit of a gear change here and they've come clean really about what their manifesto is going forwards with the Duchy of Cornwall. And there's an attempt to put a very positive spin on it that they want to focus on, you know, improving mental health, climate change, social issues. Tell us a little bit more about how they have justified what they are doing to you, well. Yeah, so once we publish that story on the private interstate, the Duchy basically said, Let's have a chat, well. Can we? Can we? Can we? Can we? You know, get ahead of this and stuff will be as terrible headlines.

And so what they then did was sit down with us and say, look, we are instigating a 10-year sort of plan. They described it as an era of change in which they don't want to just be a massive landowner. They want to have a positive impact. And so they're going to be selling off about 20% of the Duchy in order to reinvest about £500 million into things like trying to solve the housing crisis in Cornwall and the Isles of Silly and on Dartmoor. And even in places like Kennington and South London, they want to really boost renewable energy development.

They want to try and make sure that there's economic future for, places like Dartmoor for young people to boost investment in sort of struggling areas where there's social and environmental need. The message they are trying to portray is they are now very much in the world of trying to have positive change and quite be a bit activist almost, which is quite interesting from a sort of very feudal land-man. Modernising it, modernising a feudal system. But this all comes, doesn't it, after the criticism by that huge investigation in dispatches and the Sunday Times in 2024, which were. revealed the Duchy of Lancaster and the Duchy of Cornwall were leasing back to public bodies like

the NHS and the military, a disused prison on the Duchy of Cornwall, still being charged to the home office. Now, is this, Will, do you think, a reaction to the bad press? Or, you know, are you sold on this new narrative that actually William wants to change? Are you, do you think this is going to work? Well, there have been changes that came directly as a consequence of that 2024 investigation by the Sunday Times. The Duchy, after that, stopped doing any charges to charities, people like lifeboats to use slipways, community groups to use playing fields, and they stopped charges on things like allotments. So there were some quite quick changes that they were made.

I was told by Will Baxter, the chief executive, that came at a time, whether this is coincidence or not. You can make your own mind up when they were looking to make big changes. Well, it wasn't just a coincidence, definitely, because when we had our briefing with him last year after the Sunday Times and dispatches investigation, he specifically said to us, we couldn't ignore that investigation, we went away and had a long think about it, and we've made changes to address some of the concerns. And specifically sort of said that had instigated that kind of change, which makes you think, would they have made the change had they not been found out? I don't know. Maybe they would have done. But in terms of sort of, you know, what came out in your piece about the new sort of focus areas that they're doing, climate change, social housing, focus on improving people's mental health.

How has that gone down in the local communities that it's going to affect? Because most people would think that those are really good things, but not everyone might be in favour of changing a system like tenant farmers that's worked for them for a long time. Yeah, well, when I spoke to a tenant farmer in the immediate aftermath of the Dutchie telling them that they were going, the tenant farmer I spoke to was completely shocked and, you know, in disbelief and said we'd just been at a Dutchie meeting a couple weeks ago and told we're all a happy family.

The Duchy's doing really well. We've got loads of money to invest. You know, everything's great. And then they're told, you know, you're a goner. Will Baxter said that since then, they have spoken to all the tenant farmers. Apparently all of them are now, you know, in discussions about being able to buy their farms at below market rates.

He thinks the majority will buy their farms, but not everyone will be able to. He admits that. So, you know, it's going to be very mixed in terms of if you are a farmer who can, finally own your farm instead of renting it, great. You know, you've got a future for your family there that's more secure than it was before. If you are a tenant farmer who suddenly finds that you do not have the ability to buy your farm, then, you know, you are in limbo. Is the person who does

buy your farm going to be someone who wants you to continue as a tenant? Or are you no longer a farmer and, you know, your life has been completely upended? So in places like that, you know, it's really, really difficult. I think it's a mixed picture across the Duchy. And the problem with the Dutch is it's such a massive estate with so many different areas that, you know, there are going to be some winners and losers. That's it, isn't it? It is such a huge estate, Will. I think, you know, isn't the kind of the crux of this issue for people who aren't, you know, farmers on the receiving end of this new policy? For the rest of us, isn't it just a question about the fact that there's a huge estate that brings in 20 million pounds a year, more than, to, you know, to, you?

the Prince of Wales for his, he runs his office from there, he keeps his private households from that money. Isn't this a question ultimately about money and how much money should be afforded to the royal family, do you think? And do you think this transparency, these new policies coming in are going far enough? Yeah, I mean, it's a sort of fundamental question really, isn't it? Should they have these estates and how much should we know about them? Technically, they are a private estate, but there are certain laws that sort of deal with how they operate. So the Treasury has actually overall sort of oversight of what happens. And any sale over £500,000 has to be approved by the Treasury. But there are also acts in Parliament that govern what the Duchy can do.

So it has to be commercial. The Treasury has to make sure that the overall estate remains sort of commercially profitable for future generations. you know, this is where it becomes really tricky when you're dealing with, should the Duchy still be making $1.5 million a year from the Ministry of Justice for leasing Dartmoor prison when it is unoccupied because there's sort of toxic gas in it? Well, if the Dutchie said, you know, we're going to waive all those fees because we're leasing it to a government department and we want to save the government some money, actually that would be go against the sort of legislation

because the Dutchie has to act in a commercial way to make sure that it's not just losing huge amounts of money every year and becomes unviable. So it's a PR headache for William. Yeah, there's huge tensions between what legally they have to do, between what looks good and what doesn't look good to the public. And it's something that's not going to go away. So they're going to have to start playing that sort of game now

of saying you may not agree that we own it, but we do own it and we're doing something positive with it. That's their message really. Well, sounds like there's lots more stories to come from that point of view, Will. I'm sure you'll be on it and let us know how you get on. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Will Humphreys, The Times is Countryside and Southwest correspondent, and I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot more from you, digging away at the Duchy.

Brilliant scoops. Thank you, Will. Thanks very much. Well, there's lots to discuss. I think this is just going to be a subject that we keep coming back to, isn't it? Money and monarchy is... Follow the money. Well, that's it for this week of the Royals. Thank you so much for joining us and our huge thanks to Will Humphreys, The Times is Southwest and Countryside correspondent for joining us on all money matters in his badge.

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