Even the monarchy is not immune to Brexit. The king’s London home, Clarence House, will be closed to tourists this summer because of staff shortages in the royal household caused by Brexit and the pandemic.
Palace officials had hoped to open this summer, along with another royal retreat, Frogmore House, where Prince Harry and Meghan had their evening wedding reception. But the Royal Collection Trust, the department of the royal household that oversees tourist visits to the palaces, has struggled to find people willing to work in front-of-house, retail, catering and other jobs.
It means that officials only have enough people to staff the other properties on what is known as the Occupied Royal Palaces estate – a disappointment for anyone hoping to get an insight into how the king lives.
Interest in Clarence House, a four-storey 19th-century building in the Mall where Charles has lived since 2003, has risen since the coronation.
“We’ve been concentrating on other palaces and areas,” said a spokeswoman for the Royal Collection Trust. “I think there would be renewed interest in it [Clarence House], given that it is now the home of the monarch.”
Her department lost 150 staff to redundancy during the pandemic, when the trust was forced to draw down up to £33.5m from a £52m loan facility from Coutts just to keep going during the lockdowns. “We lost a lot of experienced staff who could lead tours,” she said.
No one is sure exactly how important the royal family is to British tourism. Visit Britain does not collect data directly on whether overseas visitors come to the UK because of the royals – it’s a “sensitive topic”, one official explained at a recent Tourism Alliance conference.
But royal residences such as Buckingham Palace have been popular attractions since first opening to the public during the summer of 1993, and last year Windsor Great Park attracted more than 5 million visitors, making it the third most visited attraction in the UK.
Clarence House also used to open every summer but was closed for short-term building work in 2019 and has never reopened, even though it was mentioned as one of a number of properties that the king wanted the public to see more of when he acceded to the throne in September 2022.
The staff problems facing the royal residences are shared across Britain’s tourism industry. UK Hospitality estimates there are 132,000 vacancies in the sector, and the 11% vacancy rate compares with 4% across the UK. European students who used to fill summer jobs while improving their English now need expensive work visas.
“It is much harder since Brexit to recruit,” said Bernard Donoghue, director of the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions, whose members include the Royal Collection. “It’s a real problem, given that tourism is the fifth biggest industry and the third largest generator of exports.”
Donoghue blames Brexit and the Covid pandemic for many foreign workers deciding to return to their home countries, and has been lobbying the UK’s main political parties in the run-up to the general election to make it easier to recruit staff from overseas.
“We would like a point-based system like Australia, and recognition that some jobs are still critical even though they are paying below £38,000,” he added. The government’s new threshold for bringing in immigrant skilled workers is £38,700.
Donoghue is lobbying on behalf of all his members, including the Royal Collection Trust, which he said shared similar problems to the National Trust and other attractions, even though it avoids raising political issues.
But the main parties have proved reluctant to help the palace or anyone else. “There is a worrying lack of commitment to change the status quo from all the parties we are speaking to. That is presumably because of a fear of getting into the migration debate,” he said.
Tom Jenkins, chair of the European Tour Operators Association, said: “Whoever said: ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ was never in a car crash. That adage applies to Brexit.
“What was a talent pool of 450 million has shrunk by more than 80%. This was bound to have had an impact. It did. It has also meant that tourism businesses struggle to deploy staff in Europe.”
Some royal sources point to wider issues, such as changing attitudes towards work-life balance among young British people. The chef Michel Roux suggested earlier this month that many restaurants might only be able to open three days a week in future because staff no longer want to work weekends. “It’s not just Brexit,” one palace official said.
There was also uncertainty about whether King Charles will need to use Clarence House this summer if he is coming to London for cancer treatment, although the main issue is unequivocally the lack of staff.
The result is that only six of the eight main royal residences can open this summer, with most attention focusing on Buckingham Palace’s east wing, which tourists will be able to see for the first time, including the Centre Room that leads out to the famous palace balcony.
