Duchy of Cornwall Bill [HL]

Lord Wakeham Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 26th October 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wakeham (Con)]

My Lords, first, I congratulate the noble Lord on his persistence. He has obviously done a lot of work and, as he said, this is the fourth time he has produced a Bill, although I think it is only the second time that any of them have been debated. That, in itself, constitutes the greatest measure of congratulations that I could give him on this Bill.

The Bill raises many important issues and, as the noble Lord realises, introduces changes that would dramatically alter the role of the Prince of Wales and the Duchy of Cornwall. At this stage, I certainly do not want to debate the substance of his Bill. I oppose quite a lot of it but I agree that some of the issues in it could well be, and probably will be, considered in the years to come.

What interests me is why the noble Lord thinks that a Private Member’s Bill is the way to deal with these issues, although in his closing remarks he rather implied that he did not think it was. In the interchange with his noble friend, they seemed not to be talking about the same thing—one was talking about assets and the other about income—and that indicates that this is a very much more difficult subject than can, in my view, be dealt with in a Private Member’s Bill.

I confess that I have some form on this matter. In the early 1980s I was one of the people involved in trying to negotiate a Bill which became the Duchy of Cornwall Management Act. Its purpose was to modernise the financial arrangements of the Duchy of Cornwall and how it made investments. The existing arrangements were very restrictive and came under a Duchy of Cornwall Act passed in the middle of the 19th century, which I am told was considerably influenced by Prince Albert. I suspect that Prince Albert and the noble Lord might have had quite a lot in common on some of the Duchy’s financial arrangements. As I am totally opposed to what the noble Lord is doing, I am trying to be as nice as I can be to him in my remarks. It is interesting to note that in the course of that research it was made quite clear to us that the Duchy of Cornwall was always far better run when there was a Prince of Wales of the right age to take a proper interest in the estate, and for hundreds of years that has been the position.

Faced with having to decide how to deal with the Duchy of Cornwall’s finances, we felt that the first thing we should do was consult. I spoke to the then Labour Chief Whip, the great Michael Cocks, who told me that he wanted a meeting with Prince Charles’s private secretary, Edward Adeane. We arranged a meeting, at which I provided the drinks and the charming Edward Adeane produced a paper. Michael read it very carefully and then looked up and said, “Who wrote this unstructured drivel?”. Actually, the word he used was rather stronger than that but I was advised that parliamentarily I should not say it. The Labour Chief Whip was not opposed to what we were trying to do, and in fact he eventually agreed to it. He was trying to say that it was not possible for one party to change the rules that govern our monarchy and the Duchy and so on. In our society, it could be done only through all-party agreement. He told me in no uncertain terms that the Bill we wanted to bring in did not stand a chance unless I had got the Opposition to agree that it was a sensible thing to do. We worked at it and did our best. It was not difficult to reach a compromise, as the Labour Chief Whip was not really opposed to what we were trying to do, and we got the Bill through the House of Commons in spite of the republican remarks of the great Willie Hamilton, whom some people will remember.

The lesson is quite clear: if you want to make changes to our monarchy and the way that the Duchy of Cornwall is run, it has to be done with all-party support. That means consultation with all the parties before bringing in a Bill, as well as consultation with the Commonwealth, the Churches and many others. I am not unsympathetic to some of the things that the noble Lord wants and I suspect that they will happen in the next 20 or so years, but my view is that it is not sustainable to bring about those changes through a Private Member’s Bill.