Prince Charles pressured ministers to change laws to benefit his landed estate.
According to official papers unearthed in the National Archives, John Major’s government yielded to demands from the heir to the throne that his estate be exempt from measures in the 1993 Leasehold Reform Act.
The Windsor family has used the “Queen’s consent” procedure to veto at least four draft acts that have changed leasehold laws since the 1960s. Under such laws, tenants live in properties for a specific number of years on a lease, instead of owning it outright. The changes have given tenants across the country the legal power in certain circumstances to buy their homes from their landlords.
Letters and internal memos from September and October 1992 show Charles took a “close personal interest” in Newton St Loe, a small Somerset village that is part of the £1bn Duchy of Cornwall estate, and insisted his properties there should be excluded from the proposed bill. His lobbying secured a special exemption for the village that has to this day left the tenants financially worse off.
The documents also reveal Charles wrote directly to Major in October 1992 noting that he would be shortly receiving a request to give his consent to the leasehold bill, and expressing his “particular concern” about another aspect of the proposed law – which he feared would permit tenants to buy and redevelop historic properties without preserving their “special character”.
The special exemption barring the Newton St Loe tenants from buying their homes was made public only during the enactment of a later leasehold act in 2002.
