King Charles’s property manager has tripled the pay of its chief executive in three years despite a mandate to return income to the Treasury “for the benefit of the nation”.
The crown estate, an ancient portfolio of land and property across England and Wales, paid Dan Labbad almost £1.6m last year, up by two-thirds from the year before, when he took home a pay packet of £945,000.
The chief executive’s latest payday was three times his equivalent full-year pay of £517,000 for 2019 when he stepped into the role, and almost £1m more than what his predecessor, Alison Nimmo, was paid in her final year at the helm.
The rise puts Labbad’s salary well above the remuneration typically awarded to those who manage taxpayer funds, and in line with his pay in his previous role as chief executive of Lendlease, a multinational for-profit construction and real estate company.
Labbad has presided over a major increase in revenues, as the crown’s ownership of the seabed around the British isles has turned into a big money spinner. In a series of auctions, the crown estate has raised billions from electricity operators wanting to lease sections of the ocean floor for offshore windfarms.
The property manager revealed last month that the auctions had helped generate record profits of almost half a billion pounds, while the value of its portfolio had doubled to nearly £16bn over the past decade.
The crown estate has pledged to use the income from its vast portfolio – which includes more than 200 sites in central London, as well as historic parks and coastlines – for “the benefit of the nation, its finances, and its future”.
Molly Scott Cato, the finance and economy spokesperson for the England and Wales Green Party, said the pay hike was “a disgrace” and called for “wide-scale reform” of the crown estate to make sure its income benefits the country.
“Managing the crown estate is a public service and one would expect to see the CEO’s pay reflect that. At a time when so many are struggling with the cost of living crisis it is a disgrace that his salary has risen by nearly two-thirds this year alone and that he is now paid three times what his predecessor was paid for the same job.”
“A wide-scale reform of the crown estate is long overdue to ensure that our national resources are managed with a focus on long-term sustainability and that such egregious remuneration at the public’s expense is ended once and for all,” she added.
The portfolio belongs to the reigning monarch “in right of the crown”, but it is not the king’s private property. Under current rules, the crown estate hands its profits to the Treasury before 25% is returned to the royal household in the form of the sovereign grant.
The crown estate’s recent accounts said it had hired advisers to review its approach to remuneration after the “significant transformation” of the business in recent years due to the boom in offshore wind on its seabeds.
It said the review had concluded that its pay policy was “neither realistic nor appropriate” given the scale and commercial context in which it now operates. But it added that it had a responsibility to recruit “a world-class leader” who would recognise that “some form of remuneration discount” was “appropriate to leading an organisation that serves the nation”.
A spokesperson for the crown estate said it had undergone a “significant transformation”, growing in scale and complexity, and that it competed with the private sector. “We went through a rigorous process, including working with independent advisers, to develop a new remuneration package with a significant discount to relevant benchmarks, as set out in our annual report. This will ensure we can attract and retain a world-class chief executive to help realise our legal obligations to deliver value to the nation, its finances and its future.”
