The Sovereign Grant Act 2011 (c. 15) is the Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom which introduced the Sovereign Grant, the payment which is paid annually to the monarch by the government in order to fund the monarch's official duties. It was the biggest reform to the finances of the British royal family since the inception of the Civil List in 1760. Background In 1760, King George III agreed with Parliament that he was no longer to govern in person, and therefore was no longer entitled to income from the Crown Estate, which for 700 years had always been used for the administration of the state. Parliament passed the Civil List Act 1760 which granted a fixed annual income from the Civil List. The resulting system required the annual state expenditure on the monarchy to be decided by the Treasury and presented to House of Commons. Prior to abolition, the Civil List was fixed at £7.9 million annually for the decade 2001–2010, the same amount as in 1991, with the reserve being consumed over the decade. In 2011 the Civil List was raised to £13.7 million. There were four funding sources: The Civil List paid by the Exchequer The Grant-in-Aid for Royal Travel paid by the Department for Transport The Grant-in-Aid for Communications and Information paid by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport The Grant-in-Aid for the Maintenance of the Royal Palaces paid by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport Legislation The Act came into force on 1 April 2012, the start of the financial year, and changed the arrangements for the funding of the Queen’s official duties. The Act consolidated all four funding sources into a single payment, called the Sovereign Grant. The current system is intended to be a more permanent arrangement than the previous one, which was reign-specific. The Sovereign Grant is paid annually by HM Treasury at a value indexed as a percentage of the revenues from the Crown Estate and other revenues in the financial year two years earlier. It is based on an index percentage which was initially set at 15% and this is reviewed every five years by the Royal Trustees (the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Keeper of the Privy Purse). Any unspent Sovereign Grant is put into a reserve fund. The level of the Sovereign Grant is protected by law from decreasing as