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Sovereign Grant Bill

I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt), who is clearly a royalist, and who is a founding member of the all-party parliamentary group on the Queen's diamond jubilee, and I congratulate him on that. It is easy to try to put a price on monarchy, as I think the hon. Gentleman was saying. Of course, to a certain extent, one has to do that especially in such a debate as this, but the monarchy, personified so ably by our sovereign, is not bounded by monetary value; it is about honour, nobility of conduct, its historical nature, and an institution of which we can all be proud. If we look in some detail at the mischief that the Bill is trying to redress, the finances of the royal household, designed to support Her Majesty, are currently overly complex. There are no fewer than four grants, which are themselves hidebound and bureaucratic. They have a tendency to be inflexible in that if there is a depletion of one grant, there cannot be a transfer from the other grants to fill the gap. Consequently, the system clearly does not work. That, in and of itself, irrespective of one's ideological views about monarchy as an institution, needs to be redressed. However, it goes deeper than that, because the sums of money we are talking about—approximately £35 million—are, in governmental terms, de minimis. They are miniscule. I dare say that this area of expenditure is more scrutinised, deeply analysed and debated in various forums, including this House, than other areas of the public finances, where hundred of millions, or even billions, of pounds are spent, so there is no shortage of scrutiny whatsoever. It is clear that for the first time since the early 1970s Parliament is looking at a proper modernisation of the finances of the royal household and the monarchy.