Thread: Request for information regarding the UK crown estate

Reading this the other week.

Just who is the crown estate, The Queen is the Worlds biggest landowner, though she doesn't own the land and supposedly can't sell it. the crowns estimated wealth of land ownership is 17 trillion, but the queens personal wealth is only 500 billion.

If this is true why do the crown estate not wish to provide the info requested.


https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/reque...alth_tax_hav_3

Income from commonwealth Tax Havens
Tom Young made this Freedom of Information request to The Crown Estate

The Crown Estate did not have the information requested.

From: Tom Young

3 August 2014

Dear The Crown Estate,

Given the large number of 'Tax Havens' within the commonwealth,
could you provide a full breakdown of any revenue accrued by such
territories and payments made into:

a) HM Treasury
b) The Bank of England
c) Crown Estate
d) HMRC

Yours faithfully,

Tom Young

Link to this
From: Brazier, Martin
The Crown Estate

5 August 2014

Thank you for your request for information. In regard to 'Tax Havens'
within the commonwealth, you asked for a full breakdown of any revenue
accrued by such territories and payments made into a) HM Treasury, b) The
Bank of England, c) Crown Estate, d) HMRC.



The Crown Estate manages property owned by the monarch in right of the
Crown. It owns property in the United Kingdom but does not own any
property or interests overseas. It has no role in accruing, distributing,
processing or receiving income or payments from Commonwealth countries.
Consequently, The Crown Estate does not hold the information you have
requested.



You can find out more about The Crown Estate and what it does at our
website: [1]http://www.thecrownestate.co.uk/



If you are not satisfied with my response, you may complain or appeal our
decision, which will be investigated through an Internal Review. If you
are not content with the outcome of the Internal Review, you have the
right to refer your complaint directly to the Information Commissioner for
a decision. Please note that the Information Commissioner cannot make a
decision unless you have first exhausted our own complaints procedure.

I have three properties on what they call crown land one is heritage listed, apart from that don't know much more about what crown land is tbh.

Crown land is not just the UK chassamui.

Originally Posted by fohk

Crown land is not just the UK chassamui.

Elucidate please.

Commonwealth countries where the queen is the head of state. Crown land - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia it is not a solely UK.

Originally Posted by fohk

Commonwealth countries where the queen is the head of state. Crown land - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia it is not a solely UK.

The crown lands you refer to are owned and managed by the host governments. Nothing at all to do with current ownership and management of The UK Crown Estates referred to in the OP. The only thing they have in common is a historical connection to the monarchy and the word 'crown'.
The UK and the sovereign derive no income or benefit from crown lands in commonwealth or other countries.

New Statesman | Who owns the world?

The Crown estate manages crown Land and pays the monarch 15% of revenue.

Originally Posted by Yasojack

The Crown estate manages crown Land and pays the monarch 15% of revenue.

Or to put it another way, the Monarchy gives up crown land to the government, and loses 85% of any Profits or surplus produced by the estate.

A fair and balanced view of the Monarchy from abroad:
Is the British Royal Family Worth the Money? - The Atlantic

Originally Posted by Yasojack

New Statesman | Who owns the world?

The world's primary feudal landowner is Queen Elizabeth II. She is Queen of 32 countries, head of a Commonwealth of 54 countries in which a quarter of the world's population lives, and legal owner of about 6.6 billion acres of land, one-sixth of the earth's land surface.

The entire UK consists of just under 60m acres, so for this left wing diatribe to suggest that anyone owns 6.6 billion acres is stretching credulity just a tad.

The answer could lay here.

To big to copy/paste.


http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/...8370002_en.pdf

Interesting to see you posted the Queen is the legal owner, but has no right to sell.

So she can't be the legal owner as owners have the right to sell.

Bit like this load of crap.

Crown Estate's £250m sell-off looks like a right royal stink

Today at 5pm a meeting is due to take place in the austere offices of the Crown Estate, just off Regent Street.
On one side of the table will be Paul Clark, 47, head of asset management for an estate which provides a healthy return to taxpayers on £6 billion of land and property notionally owned by the Queen. On the other side will be fearful representatives of those renting 1,300 Crown Estate homes in London which Clark wishes to sell.

The Estate is looking to raise about £250 million, according to an estimate provided by a potential buyer untroubled by the draconian gagging order imposed on potential purchasers at Christmas. The money will ease the finances on a £750 million redevelopment programme already underway at the bottom of Regent Street. A plan to sell off a £500 million chunk of the Estate-owned street got tangled in the legal long grass last year. So, where to turn next?

To Clark, who has done this sort of thing before — in 2006 to be precise. Then, our man was chief surveyor to the Church Commissioners. More than 1,100 south London homes were sold for £150 million to a 50:50 joint venture owned by the UK's largest residential property company Grainger and the Genesis Housing Association. It caused a fearful stink at the time, with tenants invading the General Synod.

The Crown Estate fears nothing more than a fearful stink: "Queen's property company cashes in on 94-year-old war veteran's home", that sort of thing. So Clark will be tiptoeing through the tulips today as he explains that no decision will be made until he has weighed up the opposition views — and weighed up the bids from potential buyers who are already touring the estates with a nice man from Knight Frank.

The tenants know perfectly well that the Crown does not like a stink: so one has been started in the form of a well-measured campaign playing on the fear that new owners will raise charges and gradually winkle out the 35% of tenants who pay controlled rents as low as £300 per month. The cause has been joined by George Galloway MP, who loves nothing more than a stink. "We need maximum pressure on government to stop this despicable action."

Funnily enough, one of the potential buyers agrees. "Do not underestimate the power of the tenants and the sensitivity of the Crown to pressure".

So, it is just possible that the sale will be dropped. But it is more than possible the sale will go ahead — if the price is right.

Who might buy? Housing Association London & Quadrant is interested. Another likely candidate is the Wellcome Trust, which owns a large London estate. Sensitivities will presumably preclude a sale to Westbrook, the hard-nosed Americans who bought Dolphin Square. But let's not forget Grainger. This week they announced a successful capital raising exercise — which left them with exactly £250 million to spend.

Pinewood project sent reeling by protests
The property development script written after the £62 million purchase of Pinewood studios in 2000 by a group of investors fronted by Lord Grade was due to have reached a happy conclusion about now. Sadly it has not. Now a major shareholder in the firm that owns the Buckinghamshire green-belt site has become impatient.

Richard Bernstein of Crystal Capital last week publicly demanded a "showdown meeting" with the former ITV chief executive who chairs studio group Pinewood Shepperton. The activist shareholder, who holds 16% of the stock, wants a more aggressive real-estate strategy to be pursued.

The AIM-listed company has yet to get the go-ahead to build 1,400 homes, camouflaged as film sets, on land at Pinewood. Protesters long ago spotted the manoeuvre, and South Bucks Council refused permission last October.

But here is where the real profits lie. If you assume £62 million was a fair price to pay for the studios, it means the housing land comes for free. At least a third of the sale price of a new home normally pays for the land. If the land is essentially free, profits soar. If you are building 1,400 homes, those profits may reach towards £100 million.

But the quick-win script is morphing into a saga that could easily be turned into a remake of a Fifties Boulting Brothers film. Objectors are now trying to get the land designated as a village green.

Pinewood Shepperton has already spent £4 million on drawing up the plans. It is almost bound to appeal against the South Bucks council decision. So this may not be the time for a James Robertson Justice-style bluster.

Convoys Wharf on the move
At last some progress at Convoys Wharf — the 40-acre site on the south bank of the Thames in Deptford bought by Hong Kong giant Hutchison Whampoa about five years ago for £100 million.

This week architect Aedas delivered drawings to the council (Lewisham). Hutchison wants to build more than 3,000 homes on land that was once Henry VIII's shipyard. The layout is generally a plan by Richard Rogers but riverfront homes have been dropped for two reasons: first, Hutchison is concerned it will find historic objects in the ground, and the outcry will prevent homes being built; and second, Lewisham seems to hold to the somewhat historic view that employment opportunities can be created by reserving the river frontage for light industrial use.

Charity from Pears' pockets
If your profits fell from £13 million to £8.3 million, would you give £4.3 million to charity? The fact the William Pears Group donates such a whopping sum tells you this family-run property company can well afford the generosity that shows up in the just-published accounts for the year to April. The family business has long been run by Mark, Trevor and David Pears, whose dowry was thousands of rental properties, mostly in north London. But they now own a huge commercial property management empire. The three directors took £2 million each from the business, up from £1.5 million each last year.

An Englander not little enough
Eliasz Englander is a very shy property developer, unknown outside the London orthodox Jewish community. The 77-year-old probably won't be mingling at the launch of a new Metro Bank due to open shortly at his latest development in Holborn. Englander once "sold" the Holborn site to the site foreman for a day to allow a crane to be erected on a Saturday — a day his religion forbids work. The 2008 accounts for one of his companies, Holborn Links, show he received rents of £8.8 million on properties bought way back for £35 million and now worth £145 million. The Estates Gazette Rich List reckons Englander is worth £160 million: a bit rich perhaps for Metro Bank.

Or how about this crap as well, thats the difference betwwen us and the USA your own your land your profit from it, not here in the UK.

he Crown Estate makes profits from shale gas fracking in the UK
On a number of occasions, and by way of example the edition of Countryfile broadcast on 4 August 2013, The Crown Estate has been cited as a 'land owner' in articles concerning 'fracking' or that it will benefit financially from fracking that takes place on peoples' land.

In the particular instance of Countryfile the presenter says: "Unlike their counterparts in the United States it (fracking) won't make them (farmers) a fortune. There are different laws in Britain and America, over there the gas is owned by the landowner whereas here it belongs to The Crown Estate and the farmer just gets paid for leasing the land that the well-head sits on."

This is incorrect, please find our official statement on the facts as they are below:

Recent policy changes regarding the method of shale gas extraction known as 'fracking' has led to widespread public interest in the matter. In particular, driven by stories from the United States of the income that land owners have received from permitting fracking on their land, land owners and media outlets have examined the nature of UK land rights and the potential allocation of profits from the process in this country.

There is a distinct contrast between land rights in the UK and the US in that an American citizen has full rights to all the minerals beneath the surface of their land. In the UK, under the Petroleum Act 1998, 'The Crown' retains all sub-surface rights to hydrocarbons, such as shale gas; so landowners will not benefit directly from the oil or gas found underneath their property.

In the context of shale gas and as with North Sea oil and gas, the rights of 'The Crown' are managed by the Secretary of State for the Department of Energy and Climate Change who, on behalf of Her Majesty, grants licences for hydrocarbon extraction. The Crown Estate does not have a role in shale gas extraction and is no different from any other landowner in the UK in this respect.

It is important to recognise the difference between the 'The Crown' as a concept, and 'The Crown Estate' as an organisation. The Crown Estate is an £8 billion asset management business tasked by Parliament with managing a diverse portfolio of assets commercially and paying all profits to the Treasury. This portfolio includes the UK seabed, London's Regent Street and much of St James's, together with one of the nation's largest rural estates. It does not include any hydrocarbon rights.

Which now leads us to this.

Turn crown estate into sovereign wealth fund, Labour MPs to urge
Group will call for legal change to set royal property porfolio to work internationally to generate wealth for UK
Share 113


inShare
10
Email
Phillip Inman, economics correspondent
The Guardian, Monday 30 September 2013 14.11 BST
Jump to comments (97)
Regent Street
Regent St: central London properties make up the bedrock of the crown estate.
Britain's £8.6bn crown estate should be turned into a sovereign wealth fund to rival government-backed investment funds that have sprung up across Europe, the Middle East and Asia in the last 20 years, a group of Labour MPs will say this week.

The MPs will tell the Co-op party's annual conference on Friday that the crown estate, which comprises vast tracts of land and commercial property across the UK, should be freed up to invest in foreign property and much-needed infrastructure projects in Britain.

Gareth Thomas, chair of the Co-op party's group of 33 Labour MPs, said such a sovereign wealth fund could boost growth and help pay the UK's debts.

Thomas said: "A British sovereign wealth fund could promote co-operation with fast-growing overseas businesses, earning the UK vital income over the long term.

"Modernising the rules governing the crown estate could, for example, allow it to invest in up-and-coming property markets in G20 states like China and India or in new technology businesses, helping Britain secure access to innovative ideas developed abroad."

The estate manages the £8.6bn of land and property that the crown owns, but which the Queen does not control and cannot sell. The estate is accountable to parliament, and pays its surplus income to the Treasury to offset the cost of maintaining the royal family.

The Treasury said there were no plans to develop a UK sovereign wealth fund to rival the £15bn French and £875m Italian government funds, though the local government minister, Eric Pickles, is consulting on whether to create a "superfund" from the UK's assorted state pension schemes, which have amassed almost £200bn in assets.

There are 89 local government pension schemes, with around £150bn under management; several others, including the Royal Mail pension scheme and the fund for MPs' pensions, have built up assets from investments in shares and bonds.

However, pension funds are excluded from the list of sovereign wealth funds, which are expected to generate wealth for the nation as a whole.

Thomas said that, with a change in the law lifting restrictions that limit it to property and land in Britain, the crown estate could become a sovereign wealth fund and develop its investment strategy.

Last year the estate generated a surplus of £253m from its investments after making an 11.9% annual return. The bedrock of the estate is the Prince Regent's London property holdings, built 200 years ago, which run from Regent's Park through Oxford Circus and Regent Street to St James's Park.

Seabeds managed by the estate are leased to offshore windfarms, and land across the UK is home to many other renewable energy schemes, business parks and factories. The fund was boosted last year by the acquisition of the Coliseum shopping park, in Cheshire, and Silverlink shopping park, outside Newcastle.

Lifting restrictions on the estate would, Thomas said, allow it "to begin to explore ventures into overseas property markets, for example in the Asian Pacific region, where eight of the world's largest 20 property markets are located, including China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and India, or taking a stake in companies set up to bring new technologies to market".

Most of the largest funds rely on oil and other commodity revenues to boost their assets under management. Norway already has a £460bn sovereign wealth fund generated from taxes on its oil and gas industry. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and China have also amassed huge wealth in funds that have become active investors in foreign markets, including the UK.

It is estimated that government-backed funds account for around $30tr (£18.5tr) of global assets, the same as the estimated $30tr of pension funds' assets. Since the beginning of 2008, which marks the high point for most stock and bond markets, funds registered with the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute have increased their assets by 59%. Much of the gain is from oil and gas revenues, which soared after the eurozone crisis caused a wholesale price rise.

The top 15 sovereign wealth funds, according to the Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute

1. Norway (Government Pension Fund Global): $737.2bn

2. Saudi Arabia (SAMA Foreign Holdings): $675.9bn

3. UAE-Abu Dhabi (Abu Dhabi Investment Authority): $627bn

4. China (China Investment Corp): $575.2 billion

5. China (SAFE Investment Co): $567.9 bn

6. Kuwait (Kuwait Investment Authority): $386bn

7. China-Hong Kong (Hong Kong Monetary Authority Investment Portfolio): $326.7bn

8. Singapore (Government of Singapore Investment Corp): $247.5bn

9. Russia (National Welfare Fund): $175.5bn

10. Singapore (Tamasek Holdings): $173.3bn

11. China (National Social Security Fund): $160.6bn

12. Qatar (Qatar Investment Authority): $115.0bn

13. Australia (Future Fund): $88.7bn

14. Algeria (Revenue Regulation Fund): $77.2bn

15. UAE-Dubai (Investment Corp of Dubai): $70.bn

Is there some sort of point you are trying to get across in this thread?

Originally Posted by Yasojack

The answer could lay here. To big to copy/paste. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/...8370002_en.pdf

It explains how the civil list came about.

The civil list has been replaced by payments from the crown estates.
Crown Estate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Woah horsey. Before you c&p any more large chunks of text, try reading and understanding a bit more than the headline.

At least half of one of those c&p chunks was totally irrelevany and nothing to do with the crown estates.

Understand the difference between the ceremonial and notional role of the monarch, and the reality of the way the treasury acts for the government who manage the land and property on behalf of the taxpayer.

The 6.6 billion acres you referred to earlier include the whole of Canada, Australia and other commonwealth countries where she is notinally head of state. Calm the fuck down before the men in white coats come for you.

Fuck me Jack, have you nothing better to do on the Sabbath?

Now moving onto crown land not being able to be sold in colonies.

What is 'Crown land'?
This is a phrase often used to cover a variety of different properties such as:

Land belonging to The Queen as monarch
The Queen's private property
Properties of the Duchies
Government land
All of these definitions are partly correct, but naturally it can be somewhat confusing. To avoid this, we always refer to our property and land as being 'The Crown Estate'.

http://webb-site.com/codocs/RBL1.pdf

Originally Posted by Yasojack

Now moving onto crown land not being able to be sold in colonies.

Good idea, ignore all the mistakes you have just made and move the goalposts again.

Originally Posted by Yasojack

What is 'Crown land'?

Already answered but you didn't like the answer because it didn't fit in to your angry rant. Again ignore and obfuscate.
You can talk to yourself from now on.
Who owns your land Jacko?

Originally Posted by Yasojack

What is 'Crown land'?

bit more of the crown land for sale.

Crown land sale to draw interest
PUBLISHED : Saturday, 30 April, 1994, 12:00am
UPDATED : Saturday, 30 April, 1994, 12:00am
By KENNETH KO

09 Oct 2014

SCMP and RTHK present Hong Kong's Top Story 2014
THE public auction of two residential plots of Crown land next month is expected to draw fair bidding interest.


The first government auction of the current financial year will take place in the City Hall on May 26.


Analysts predicted that bidding for the two sites, in Fanling and Yuen Long respectively, would not be too exciting mainly because of their remote locations.


The weak market conditions might dampen bidding sentiment at the auction hall.


Overall, the auction is expected to reflect the confidence of developers on the market following the consolidation of the home market.


The sales result is also expected to have an effect on the direction of home prices, which have fallen 10 per cent or more since the end of last month.


The two lots are a 20,780 sq metre site at Luen Wo Hui, Fanling, and a 5,889 sq metre site at Fung Kam Street, Yuen Long.


The Fanling site can provide a gross floor area of more than 64,112 sq metres, while the Yuen Long site will have a gross floor area of at least 19,000 sq metres.


Analysts are still studying full particulars and conditions of the sale of the sites and are unable to work out their projections yet.

She is Queen of 32 countries, head of a Commonwealth of 54 countries in which a quarter of the world's population lives, and legal owner of about 6.6 billion acres of land, one-sixth of the earth's land surface.

Reading the Crown Estate website is like trying to find info about the Federal Reserve from its website. Pointless.

The Queen could sell if she wanted to but why would she? Its about control and expanding control and these biannual stories of "Prince Charles down to his last 2 million" is fucking laughable. Not only do they contribute fuck all to the UK, they take take take, cost millions in security, and cream it in by the second. The richest family on earth;I bet they laugh their fucking rings to prolapse when they see the forbes list wanking over Gates and Co. This family could buy them all out without noticing.

As for "tax Havens"etc? What a stupid question.

HER MAJESTIES CUSTOMS AND EXCISE.

The clue is in the name. it is about collecting for them, not them fucking paying a penny (even though they pretend to). They do what ever the fuck they like any time they like. Untouchable. Democracy? So funny.

Originally Posted by Yasojack

Now moving onto crown land not being able to be sold in colonies.

Who said crown land can't be sold?

Chaz your very gullible, Your trained that way to believe everything your instructed to believe.
You should have a little look around at how corrupt the British crown and govt truly are.