Prince Harry's return to UK reignites debate over taxpayer-funded security

Prince Harry's return to Britain has revived a long-running argument over whether taxpayers should pay to protect him and his family, with former protection officers telling news agency AFP that the threats against him are real.

The Duke of Sussex landed with his wife Meghan and their two children last week, six years after the couple stepped back from royal duties and moved to North America. He had previously said he would not bring his family back, citing the security arrangements available to him.

When the family arrived at Birmingham Airport on August 26, they had private security in place rather than police officers, according to British media. Harry has reportedly been pushing for police protection to be reinstated.

"It's very surprising," Scott Hamer, a former protection officer for Harry's father King Charles III during his time as Prince of Wales, told AFP. "There's probably people who are being protected now who are at less threat and risk than he is. So the question would be, why does he not receive that protection as well?"

Harry and Meghan are reported to be living in the Cotswolds, in central England, and to have enrolled seven-year-old Prince Archie and five-year-old Princess Lilibet at private schools in the area for the coming academic year.

That routine is itself the concern. Daily drop-offs and pick-ups happen at fixed times and fixed places, and predictability is what protection officers dislike most.

"The vulnerability aspect needs to be assessed," Hamer said. "The fact that he'll have to take his kids to school at the same time each day, and pick them up at the same time each day, now makes him quite vulnerable."

Decisions of this kind rest with the Royal and VIP Executive Committee, or Ravec, an independent body overseen by the Home Office that determines which politicians, royals and other public figures receive police protection. With Harry now resident, Ravec's risk management board is expected to re-evaluate the threat level he faces.

Hamer said that threat was "very real", ranging from international terrorism to extreme right-wing actors hostile to Harry's marriage to Meghan, who is mixed-race.

Ravec downgraded Harry's protection in February 2020, after he and Meghan gave up their roles as working royals. Rather than automatic cover, the family was placed on a bespoke arrangement assessed trip by trip, requiring advance notice of visits.

Harry took the Home Office to court over it and lost twice. In February 2024, retired High Court judge Sir Peter Lane ruled Ravec's approach was neither irrational nor procedurally unfair. In May 2025, the Court of Appeal dismissed his challenge, with Sir Geoffrey Vos finding that Harry had, in effect, been stepping in and out of the group Ravec protects. Harry called that ruling a "good old-fashioned Establishment stitch-up".

During the appeal, his barrister Shaheed Fatima told the court that al-Qaeda had called for the prince to be killed after the downgrade.

Speaking to the BBC immediately after the judgment, Harry said he could not see a world in which he would bring his wife and children back to Britain, and that it saddened him he would be unable to show his children his homeland. That position has now reversed.

The Sunday Times reported last week that Harry's lawyers wrote to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood in August asking her to intervene, saying he had lost confidence in Ravec's ability to rule fairly on his case.

A government spokesperson said the protective security system was "rigorous and proportionate", adding that it was long-standing policy not to disclose details of arrangements because doing so could compromise them.

Part of Harry's argument turns on a practical point: private security contractors in Britain cannot carry firearms.

"That's what his argument is: that the threat against him is so great that it can only be dealt with [through] an official police protection team," Simon Morgan, another former royal protection officer. "He feels that he should get it."

A poll last week for The i Paper found just six per cent think Harry's security should be fully taxpayer-funded, while 63 per cent believe the couple should pay for it themselves.

"He's paid for security in the States. I can't see why he can't pay for security here, it's a lot less dangerous," royal expert Andrew Lownie told AFP.

Hamer argued that Harry's status as a non-working royal "shouldn't be part of it", pointing out that former prime ministers keep their protection after leaving office. Lownie expects Harry to secure at least some taxpayer-funded cover on the same logic, while warning about the cost.

The bill has grown sharply. Six prime ministers have left office in the past decade, against two in the ten years before that. "If we're doing it for all these prime ministers, then I think we're going to have to do it for Harry and his family. But that is going to cost a lot of money," Lownie said.

Harry has consistently argued that he faces elevated risk both as the King's son and because of his military service. He completed two tours of Afghanistan, and in his 2023 memoir "Spare" wrote that he had killed 25 Taliban fighters.

That disclosure drew criticism from some British veterans at the time, who said it could raise the personal risk to him.

Meghan had not visited Britain since the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in September 2022. The children were last in the country in June 2022, when the family marked Lilibet's first birthday at Frogmore Cottage.