Dutch government pays royal family twice

This 2016 video is called Noordeinde [royal] Palace in The Hague, The Netherlands.

Translated from Dutch NOS TV today:

‘The government has been paying double money for maintenance of palaces for almost forty years’

Since 1982, the royal family has been receiving an annual allowance for the maintenance of palace inventories, while the state has paid for that maintenance all the time. NRC daily reports this on the basis of its own research. This year it concerns an allowance of an estimated 320,000 euros. …

Government party [one of four parties in the right-wing coalition government] D66 and opposition party GroenLinks want clarification from Prime Minister Rutte. …

Between 1982 and 2009, the central government took over almost the entire contents of the palaces Noordeinde, Huis ten Bosch, Het Loo and Soestdijk. For the contents of the first three palaces, around 20 million guilders were paid to Princess [ex-queen] Juliana in the 1980s. That now amounts to around 17 million euros. Parliament was not informed about this. In 2009 an unknown amount was paid for the inventory of Soestdijk.

With the purchase of the inventories, the government was obliged to maintain them, but the head of state continued to receive the allowance every year. A note recently made public by the National Archives shows that a total of 280,000 guilders was paid in 1978. That amount has been indexed and has risen to around 320,000 euros this year. …

Personnel and material expenses

The amount for the maintenance of the inventories, indexed at 320,000 euros this year, is part of the 4.9 million euros that King Willem-Alexander receives this year for ‘personnel and material expenses‘. This amount is hardly specified on the King’s Budget.

NRC deduces from an internal government document that the money for the maintenance of the palaces was still paid to the head of state in 2015. The newspaper estimates the total amount received for maintenance and replacement of furniture at 10 million euros (2019 price level).

[1978 Prime Minister] Van Agt did insist that the payments to the head of state should be adjusted downwards after the purchases, because the maintenance costs for the royal family also decreased. It is unclear why that never happened.

After the purchase, the state gave the contents of Noordeinde and Huis ten Bosch on loan to the royals free of charge.