Doncaster, England (CNN) The first time Angela Davis walked up to a blackboard was humbling. The single mother-of-five – with three children still living at home – had found that after paying her bills, she simply ran out of money to buy groceries.
“It felt humiliating. I was a bit down,” she told CNN over a cup of tea and biscuits served at the community cafe at St. John the Evangelist Church in Doncaster. The church runs the cafe along with a food bank that offers free food, clothing, household items, and other necessities to local people who are struggling.
Davis queued early and arrived two hours before the church doors opened. The wait has paid off. In addition to the essentials such as bread and vegetables, she received a bouquet of flowers that a supermarket had donated. “I’ll put the lilies in my vase and the rest on my mother’s grave,” she said.
When it first opened before the pandemic, the food bank mainly served the homeless. Today, many of those who walk through the door are people who work full-time.
“They use all of their wages to pay the bills and they have no money left for food. It’s really sad that it gets to the point where someone works full-time and doesn’t make enough money to meet basic human needs.” Andy Unsworth, a church minister who oversees the Given Freely Freely Given board, told CNN .
Doncaster is among the UK’s more economically disadvantaged areas, but is not unique. Like much of northern England, the South Yorkshire town of just over 300,000 never fully recovered from the industrial decline and mine closures of the 1980s and 90s. The region, already struggling, has been hit hard by the severe cost of living crisis now affecting the whole of Britain.
Persistently high inflation, years of wage stagnation and the sudden and steep rise in energy prices have pushed millions of Britons to the brink of poverty.
But at the same time, the British government is preparing to spend tens of millions of tax dollars on a glamorous event celebrating a very, very wealthy man: King Charles III.
Liz Coopey, left, a volunteer at the Given Freely Freely Given charity in Doncaster, helps local resident Angela Davis with her shopping bags.
The King’s coronation this Saturday will showcase some of the vast wealth the British monarchy has amassed over the centuries. There will be golden carriages and priceless jewels and bespoke designer outfits that cost more than most people make in months.
The government has refused to put a figure on the cost of the coronation, with British media estimates ranging from £50m to more than £100m ($63m to $125m).
It’s a number many at Doncaster find hard to swallow.
“I’m a bit of a royalist and I like the royal family. But I don’t think they really read the room, so to speak. Much of this should have come from their own pockets rather than the taxpayer. And I think it should have been toned down a bit,” said Laura Billington, a teacher at a school in the city.
She has seen the impact the cost of living crisis has had on her students. Many come to school without the most basic equipment, such as pens and pencils. She has also noticed more problems with behavior and concentration.
“I’ve never seen students be so apathetic about studying — whether it’s because they’re tired or hungry, because they only get one meal at school and that’s literally all they’re going to eat today,” she said .
Billington feels the pinch too. Her bills have risen and her salary has not risen in line with inflation, leaving her significantly worse off in real terms. She is not alone. Across the UK, real wages including bonuses fell 3% in the three months to February, according to the Office for National Statistics. This is one of the biggest dips since records began in 2001.
Billington is a union representative at her school and, like hundreds of thousands of her colleagues, she has been on strike over pay in recent months. She said strained school budgets mean teachers face an increasingly unmanageable workload.
She works full time and spends 22 hours a week in the classroom. She has almost three hours a week for preparation, planning and evaluation, which she feels is not enough. Because of the rest of her workload—meetings, tutoring, after-school chores, and so on—she brings most of her prep work home with her. She estimates that this extra – unpaid – work adds up to about 15 hours a week. Last Sunday, she would spend most of the day marking history tests. Billington is a French teacher. She only teaches history due to staff shortages.
“All I’ve ever wanted to do is be a teacher. But it wasn’t for my students, I think I probably would have started teaching quite a while ago,” she said.
The UK has been hit by a major wave of strikes in recent months, with nurses, junior doctors, midwives, healthcare workers, university staff, train drivers and civil servants – including staff checking passports at airports – all on strike over pay disputes.
Most public sector workers have been offered pay rises of 4% or 5% for the current fiscal year, well below the annual inflation rate, which has exceeded 10% for seven straight months. Food prices are rising particularly painfully: bread cost 19.4% more in March than in the previous year.
The King inherited Balmoral Castle from his mother, the late Queen Elizabeth II.
The wealth of the monarchy
The King’s vast private wealth and lavish lifestyle stand in stark contrast to the realities most people in the UK are living at the moment.
Buckingham Palace has declined to comment on the royal family’s financial situation, arguing they have a right to privacy. The Guardian newspaper recently put Charles’ personal fortune at more than £1.8billion – although the palace told the newspaper that figure was “a most creative mix of speculation, assumptions and inaccuracies”.
Forbes last year estimated that the late Queen Elizabeth II’s personal fortune was worth $500 million, including her jewellery, art collection, investments and two residences, Balmoral Castle in Scotland and Sandringham House in Norfolk, England. The Queen inherited both possessions from her father, King George VI, and passed them on to Charles.
This is where the biggest financial benefit of being the monarch comes into play. The king is exempt from paying taxes and although he chooses to pay income tax voluntarily, he did not have to pay inheritance tax – normally set at 40% – his mother left him. This saved him tens of millions of pounds that would otherwise go to the UK Treasury.
Craig Prescott, a British constitutional law expert and lecturer at Bangor University, told CNN the inheritance tax exemption boils down to a desire to keep the monarchy independent.
“In theory, the monarchy has constitutional powers. In the most extreme scenario, you don’t necessarily want a prime minister to say, ‘You have to give royal assent to this hugely controversial and democratically subversive bill, or I’m going to cut your funding,'” he said.
“Keeping property in direct line of succession ensures that the monarchy has some independence from the government of the day.”
Despite being enormously wealthy, the Queen had a reputation for being relatively frugal. British media often pointed out rumors that she used Tupperware to store her breakfast cereals and never threw away anything that was still good enough to use.
“She wasn’t all that interested in ostentatious displays of wealth, relatively speaking. In her own private capacity, she personally lived a life of reticence,” Prescott told CNN. “I think the king doesn’t necessarily have the same image. Whether you could call him thrifty or reserved, I’m not sure,” he added.
King Charles III greets people as he visits the Mansion House in Doncaster on 9th November 2022.
worse than ever
Doncaster was one of the first places Charles visited after becoming king. He took a helicopter there to mark it being officially declared a city in November.
He was received with the usual pomp – even as many Doncaster residents hit rock bottom.
“It’s worse than ever,” said Kelly Widdowson, the manager of the Helping Hands Community Center in Edlington, on the outskirts of town.
Like the plaque at St. John the Evangelist, this community center has seen an influx of new patrons who are struggling to make ends meet despite working full-time. The center offers inexpensive meals and food packages, financial counseling, after-school programs, and a range of other services.
“Gas and electricity prices have skyrocketed, food prices have skyrocketed,” Widdowson told CNN. “Both me and my husband work full-time and we struggle. We cannot afford to live. I have three children in elementary school. That’s £2.50 three times a day for school lunches,” she said.
James Woods, chief executive of Citizens Advice Doncaster Borough, said the biggest misconception about the current crisis is the notion that only those at the bottom of the socio-economic chain are struggling.
“We have seen a large influx of people contacting us from the more affluent areas of Doncaster, people who have not faced these problems in the past. A larger number of people suffer from in-work poverty,” he said.
Woods said most people who come to the Citizens Advice Office are struggling with debt and utility bills, or need help navigating the over-complicated welfare system.
“The worrying thing, and you see it quite often, is that people are afraid to turn on the heating. For me that’s not right. In a country that’s considered fairly prosperous, you shouldn’t be in a situation where you feel like you can’t heat during the winter months,” he told CNN.
Davis said her gas and electric bills are now three times what they were last year — and that’s after she reduced electricity use by regularly turning off the heat.
“The winter was really cold. I was always in my dressing gown. I have slippers with fur in them and I always wore an extra pair of socks, but it was really cold,” she said. Her arthritis worsened due to the cold environment, her hands and fingers became stiff, and her ankles swelled.
James Woods is the Chief Executive Officer of Citizens Advice Doncaster Borough.
Widdowson asked if the government understood how dire the situation was on the ground.
“You don’t live that life where you have to struggle, where you have to wash your kids’ hair with a bar of soap because you can’t afford the shampoo, where you buy a bag of potatoes and a box of eggs, um trying to keep you a week so you have a jacket potato one day and fries the next day and fried potatoes the next because your household lives on a sack of potatoes,” she said.
“We had a gentleman come in and he ate dog food because it was cheaper. He wanted to feed the dog and instead of buying human food and giving it to the dog, he bought dog food to make sure the dog was taken care of and then just eat the dog food with the dog.”
Widdowson’s colleague Peter Davey said the longer the cost-of-living crisis drags on, the more complex people’s problems are and the greater the toll on their mental health – something the country’s overburdened public health system, the NHS, is not equipped to deal with.
“If someone is unemployed or on low income, they don’t have money, they’re going to struggle one way or another. He can’t afford to pay the bills, he’ll worry, the next anxiety comes along and he gets depressed, they end up on drugs and wait months for therapy,” he said.
Decades of underfunding and chronic staffing shortages have meant long waits for important healthcare appointments have escalated over the course of the pandemic.
The community center has established new counseling services and a support group for a growing number of survivors of intimate partner violence and abuse. At the Citizens Advice Office, staff have been conducting suicide awareness training after increasing numbers of clients began showing signs of risk, Woods said.
The staff and volunteers at Doncaster’s Helping Hands Community Center gather at his cafe.
Royal Wealth
Royal fans often argue that the monarchy offers good value to British taxpayers because it boosts tourism and consumer spending, particularly around major events. But with three major royal events – the platinum jubilee, the Queen’s funeral and the coronation – taking place in less than a year, the bills are adding up.
With large swathes of the country suffering, many are now questioning the appropriateness of holding another publicly funded royal extravaganza – especially as Britain is the only European monarchy left with coronations.
“The thing to remember is that the coronation is a state event and that means it should be paid for by the state,” Prescott said. “To an extent, the king has no choice. The expectation was always that we would have a coronation for a new monarch,” he said, adding that there had been monarchs in the past who wanted to skip the ceremony – like William IV – but were convinced it would was a constitutional requirement.
Billington, the teacher, added: “I feel sorry for the king because he’s waited decades for this to happen and now in his 70s he’s finally getting to be the king and suddenly his crowning glory is in the middle of a livelihood crisis that isn’t is his fault.”
“But at the same time he has all these lands, he has all the money that comes out of the estates, maybe he couldn’t have said, ‘Right, well, as a royal family we’re going to foot half the bill and not from public funds,'” she said.
As the current Sovereign, Charles owns the £16.5 billion Crown Estate, an expansive portfolio of real estate and investments that includes numerous buildings in central London, offshore wind farms and farmland.
But while the king is technically the owner of the estate, it is not his private property. He has no say in how it’s managed, and he certainly can’t sell any of it. Under an agreement dating back to 1760, the monarch surrenders all profits from the estate to the government in exchange for a share known as the sovereign grant.
The grant is essentially the king’s expense account, covering expenses such as travel, staff and household expenses. In 2017, the allowance was increased from 15% to 25% of profits for the following 10 years to cover Buckingham Palace renovation costs. It has been set at £86.3m for this financial year, the same as last year.
Another important source of income for the king is the Duchy of Lancaster, a private estate dating back to 1265 and worth £653 million. In the last financial year, the Duchy generated £24million in revenue for the King.
The end of an era
The world has grown accustomed to seeing spectacular royal events on a regular basis over the past decade. Since 2011 there have been two major anniversaries, several major royal weddings and a one-off state funeral. However, this era is coming to an end.
“This coronation will be the last great royal event, the last great moment for the monarchy for quite some time, until Prince George’s marriage maybe in 15, 20 years,” Prescott speculated.
Given Freely Given Freely Given in Doncaster offers their customers not only food, but also household goods and clothing.
At St John the Evangelist Church in Doncaster, Coronation Day will be just another Saturday, with the table and community cafe running as usual. Saturdays have been very busy in recent months because they are usually the only day people who work can come.
As every week, Unsworth and his team will work hard to make people feel welcome – especially those who are coming for the first time.
Liz Coopey, one of the volunteers there, said she understands the idea of having to rely on a food bank could be scary for many. “But right now everyone is feeling the pinch, unless you’re a millionaire,” she said.
Speaking about one particular millionaire – the king – she too said she wasn’t sure it was wise to spend millions of public money on the coronation.
“I’m not saying the monarchy is a bad thing because I don’t think it is. But, you know what? Put simply, when the country is standing on the bones of its ass, it doesn’t look good,” she said.
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