Ministers will have no role in deciding whether to reinstate Prince Harry’s taxpayer-funded armed police protection when he visits the UK.
The royal and VIP executive committee (Ravec), which is overseen by the Home Office, has launched a fresh risk assessment of Duke of Sussex’s security, sources have confirmed.
A decision is expected next month, before the duke’s scheduled visit to the UK in February, when he is expected to give evidence in his court case against Associated Newspapers.
The decision to reassess the duke’s security risk comes after a letter he wrote to Shabana Mahmood, the home secretary, in September calling for a new threat assessment to be carried out.
He asked Ravec to “abide by its own rules”, which state that a risk-management board should be conducted for each member of the royal family and other qualifying VIPs every year. The duke even called on the prime minister to “step in”.
Harry’s last threat assessment was carried out in 2020, before he withdrew from royal duties, and in May this year he lost a High Court battle to reinstate police protection.
However, The Times has been told that no minister will be involved in any process of the new risk assessment or the final decision on whether to reinstate his security.
Ravec includes security officials from the Home Office, the Metropolitan Police and the royal household, who work together to advise the independent chair to make decisions on who should be given protection and at what level.
While Ravec authorises security for senior royals on behalf of the Home Office, the chair’s decision is independent of ministerial involvement.
The Home Office has legal responsibility for the committee’s decision and successfully opposed the duke’s appeal in May. After the High Court decision the Home Office said it was “pleased” the court had found in favour of the “government’s position in this case”.
The new review could restore the duke’s entitlement to taxpayer-funded security when he is in the UK. At present he must inform the Metropolitan Police 30 days in advance of arriving in the country in order to apply for a security review, which is carried out on a case-by-case basis.
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Sources told The Sun, which first revealed that a new assessment was under way, that the process was more expensive than having a few salaried armed officers accompany him on his rare visits to the UK.
The risk assessment could pave the way for his two children to return to the UK for the first time since 2022 when they last saw their grandfather, the King. Archie, six, and Lillibet, four, live in California with Harry and Meghan.
The duke had argued that the UK was not safe for him and his family to visit without 24-hour armed protection.
The Home Office refused to comment on the new risk assessment.
A government spokesman said: “The UK government’s protective security system is rigorous and proportionate. It is our long-standing policy not to provide detailed information on those arrangements as doing so could compromise their integrity and affect individuals’ security.”
Since he left royal duties nearly six years ago, the duke has returned to the UK on only a few occasions. After losing the High Court battle he said that the decision about his security was like “a good old-fashioned establishment stitch-up”.
The duke called on Yvette Cooper, then the home secretary, to review the case “very, very carefully” and added: “I would ask the prime minister to step in.”
At his appeal against the High Court decision, his lawyer Shaheed Fatima KC argued that the Ravec had failed to get an assessment from an “expert specialist body called the risk-management board” and had used a “different and so-called ‘bespoke process’”.
She told the Court of Appeal that the failure to carry out a risk-management board assessment for the Duke meant that Ravec “did not have the expert analysis that it needed” to determine whether he should be treated like people in the “other VIP category”.
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