A number of idyllic-looking homes in estates owned by King Charles and Prince William do not meet energy standards for rentals
Royal estates rent out homes that fail to meet legal energy efficiency standards
This summer, the duchy of Cornwall got a new-look website with a bold statement of intent at the top: “We’re on a mission to become a world-leading impact organisation.”
Updating the website will have been the easiest part of that mission. Upgrading hundreds of ageing, mostly rural, rented cottages, farmhouses and country houses will be one of the hardest.
For many tenants, it will be long overdue. One, who is in failing health and struggling to heat a mostly uninsulated home where the only source of warmth is coal-fired stoves, said: “This place is not up to the standards of the 20th century, let alone the 21st. It’s archaic. It needs to be upgraded but I don’t think they want to spend the money.”
There is money. Established in 1337 to provide an income to male heirs to the throne, the duchy of Cornwall is unburdened by many of the taxes faced by other landlords, such as corporation tax, capital gains tax and inheritance tax. It enjoys profit margins of about 60% and pays out more than £20m a year to the monarch’s eldest son.
Changes are afoot: the duchy announced earlier this year that it would be selling off 20% of the estate over the next decade and investing £500m in local communities, housing and environmental projects.
Prince William, four years into his tenure as the 25th duke of Cornwall, has promised to transform his inheritance: “There is so much good we can do. I’m trying to make sure I’m prioritising stuff that’s going to make people’s lives, living in those areas, better.”
However, the same tenant is not convinced he will benefit. “I’m sure this is one of the properties that he will sell and I don’t know what will happen to me after that,” he said. “Will they have to find somewhere else for me or will I just be turfed out?”
It is the dilemma facing many duchy tenants, most of whom are reluctant to speak out, in parts of the country where the housing crisis is being keenly felt.
Many properties in these areas – including those owned by the duchies – have been turned into holiday lets. Combined with an abundance of second homes, there are few other rental properties available for tenants.
At first glance, some of the duchy cottages look idyllic. But many were built cheaply, over the centuries, for the agricultural working poor. The older ones are stone, the relatively newer ones typically a single skin of brick. They are often clustered around farms, but some are the towns and villages dotted throughout the duchy’s heartlands in Cornwall, the Isles of Scilly and Dartmoor.
Time and again the same complaints surface – the duchy doesn’t like to spend money, repairs take an age, friends are envious, but the homes are cold, winters hard.
They are not the kind of properties that make it into the duchy’s glossy annual reports, which under William have been renamed “impact reports”. The homes that feature tend to be the newer-built developments at Poundbury in Dorset and Nansledan in Cornwall.
Commercial investments now make up over half of the duchy’s income, but the homes it owns will only become a bigger headache as standards for rental properties are raised.