His grandmother’s face may be on the money, but that won’t make it any easier to pay for the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton next Friday.
From a $50,000 dress to holiday overtime pay for 5,000 police officers to a six-figure cleaning bill, everything about the royal wedding will be oversized and grandiose, a public spectacle on a scale not seen – or paid for – since Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953.
So across Britain, people are asking a question often posed by friends and relatives of newlyweds: Who, exactly, is paying for it?
The answer is not so simple, with the official costs of the event and its vast security apparatus split among various branches of the Royal Family, the police, the military, and several local and national government departments. But most of the bill will be footed by British taxpayers.
The biggest cost of the wedding by far will be the $6.4-billion price of shutting down the British economy for 24 hours by declaring next Friday a national holiday, according to estimates from the Confederation of British Industry, the country’s major corporate lobby group.
That will be a painful blow for a country that faces a fiscal deficit of $256-billion this year – and, to make matters worse, the wedding falls amid a cluster of other holidays, leaving only three working days between April 22 and May 2. Many businesses are expected to stay shut through the entire 10-day period, a string of lost productivity that could remove $47-billion from economic output, according to an estimate by accounting firm RSM Tenon.
To counterbalance that somewhat, there will be some Britons spending money on the big day. But not much: One poll found that just a third of citizens will be celebrating the royal wedding in any way, spending an average of $45 each on party food, booze and memorabilia.
Two different reports by retail organizations projected that the event and its crowd of tourists would boost consumer spending by either $753-million or $973-million – a small share of the money lost due to the holiday. But these failed to take into account the millions of Britons who will leave the country, many in order to get away from the wedding and its crowds, thus taking even more money out of the economy.
Beyond these larger economic costs, the official costs of the event are expected to exceed $78-million, and many of these will simply be grossly oversized versions of the usual wedding costs (the average British wedding, according to one study, is $29,000).
The Queen, whose personal wealth is estimated at $455-million, has pledged to pay for a share of the wedding, though officials from Clarence House, the office of Prince Charles, said in a briefing this week that the Royal Family’s input would be “in the six figures, not in the seven figures.”
The Royal Family will be picking up those costs “you’d normally associate with a wedding… such as flowers, reception, transport,” the Clarence House official said. “It’s being paid for by the Royal Family with a contribution from the Middletons.”
In fact, it was revealed this week that the bride’s family, who are the wealthy owners of an online party-supply company but are not state-funded aristocrats themselves, will be putting up an estimated $157,000 for the cost of “hotel suites, bridal gowns, bridesmaids’ dresses, the maid of honour’s outfit and the honeymoon,” according to the Times.
A good part of that cost will be for hotel rooms, including a two-bedroom, five-room suite at the posh Goring hotel in Belgravia that costs $6,275 a night. In total, the family’s hotel bill is expected to exceed $31,000.
On top of this, they will be paying for Ms. Middleton’s bridal gowns, estimated at $47,000, and another $31,000 for bridesmaids’ dresses and the mother-of-the-bride outfit.
