How Prince Charles prevented his tenants from buying their homes

The royal family is said to have used this obscure procedure based on the sovereign’s consent to examine three parliamentary acts that have prevented residents of Prince Charles’ estate from buying their own homes for decades. As part of this « Queen’s Consent ”, the Queen and Prince of Wales have been authorized to review the content of bills by government ministers and to approve them before they are passed by Parliament.

Three bills considered by Prince Charles

The first law which granted exemptions to the heir to the British throne was the Leasehold Reform Act of 1976, developed The Guardian. It aimed to reform the lease law under which landlords give buyers the right to live in a property for a certain number of years on a lease, instead of owning it outright. Files in the National Archives prove that Queen Elizabeth II was invited in February 1967 to consider this bill before MPs began debating its contents. Prince Charles then benefited from these concessions by taking over the Cornwall estate two years later, at age 21.

The second law was that of 1993 on the reform of the lease, housing and urban development. The exemptions have been changed to include specific properties within the Duchy of Cornwall that were on the Isles of Scilly and Dartmoor, points out The Guardian. In particular, it has been registered: “The value of any leasehold property will decrease as the term of the lease attached to it decreases. Any buyer is fully informed at the time of purchase ”. Because of this clause, many tenants in this estate were prevented from buying full ownership of the house they had lived in since the 1960s, which, in addition, had lost value.The third law approved by Prince Charles was the Commonhold and Lease Reform Act of 2002, when the exemptions were again amended, this time to include houses in the small village of Newton St Loe, near Bath. Several tenants were once again not allowed to buy their homes and the money invested before the law was not returned to them. They therefore had to live in buildings of diminishing or no financial value.

Preserve the financial value of your estate

In short, these exemptions allowed the prince to preserve the financial value of his estate and to bring him income because tenants must pay him rent each year, points out The Guardian. Residents say they have not been able to find out why and how the heir to the throne was able to obtain preferential treatment from the government. The heir to the British throne declined to comment when asked if he or his family lobbied the government for the exemptions in these three laws. However, The Guardian established that he and his mother, the Queen, were allowed to approve the contents of the three acts in an obscure parliamentary process known as the « Queen’s Consent ».

Thanks to this mechanism, Elizabeth II examined more than 1,000 parliamentary bills during her reign to verify whether any of them affected the Crown or her private interests. Previously secret documents have revealed that the Queen used this procedure to secretly lobby for certain laws to be changed to benefit her interests or to reflect her views on government policy. In total, at least 275 bills were approved by the prince between 1970 and 2020 under the same procedure. They include a wide range of laws ranging from banning fox hunting to changes in inheritance laws.