Thousands of taxpayers don't want to pay for Buckingham Palace renovation
LONDON -- Home improvements come with a price tag. If that house happens to be Buckingham Palace, then the price tag is £369m.
Last week the UK Treasury announced that taxpayers will be footing the bill for the 10-year refurbishment.
Naturally, not everyone is happy about it. In fact, hundreds of thousands of people have signed a petition to urge the royal family to pay for the palace's refurbishments themselves.
You May Also Like
The Royal Trustees -- including the prime minister and chancellor -- said that the works would be funded by a temporary increase in the Sovereign Grant -- a publicly funded grant which pays for the expenses of running the Queen's household.
The refurbishment of the palace -- which contains 775 rooms and 78 bathrooms -- will involve repairs to cables, lead pipes, and the replacement of boilers and wiring.
The petition to make the royals pay for the palace renovation has been signed more than 120,000 times.
"Buckingham Palace is about to be given a £369m ($457.5m) refurbishment. Tax payers are paying for it. The Crown and its estates should be made to fund its own renovations," reads a description on the petition started by a person named Mark Johnson.
"There is a national housing crisis, the NHS is in crisis, austerity is forcing cuts in many front line services. Now the Royals expect us to dig deeper to refurbish Buckingham Palace. The Crown's wealth is inestimable."
"This is, in a word, outrageous," the petition continued.
Many people took to Twitter to express their opposition to the expense given the current economic issues facing British people.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.
Rachel Thompson is the Features Editor at Mashable. Rachel's second non-fiction book The Love Fix: Reclaiming Intimacy in a Disconnected World is out now, published by Penguin Random House in Jan. 2025. The Love Fix explores why dating feels so hard right now, why we experience difficult emotions in the realm of love, and how we can change our dating culture for the better.
A leading sex and dating writer in the UK, Rachel has written for GQ, The Guardian, The Sunday Times Style, The Telegraph, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Stylist, ELLE, The i Paper, Refinery29, and many more.
Rachel's first book Rough: How Violence Has Found Its Way Into the Bedroom And What We Can Do About It, a non-fiction investigation into sexual violence was published by Penguin Random House in 2021.
