The roofs will need work, some rewiring is badly needed — and then there is the asbestos problem.

The Queen is facing a maintenance backlog which she can’t afford at a time when the cost of keeping the Royal Family rose by £2 million last year to a total of £40 million. A packed itinery of expensive foreign trips pushed travel costs alone beyond the £6.2 million mark, but Palace officials admit that the Queen still could not afford to redecorate.

Publishing the Royal Household’s annual financial report yesterday, Sir Alan Reid, Keeper of the Privy Purse, gave warning of a £32 million black hole in funding.

The budget for maintaining Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle and other royal buildings has been frozen by the Treasury for the next three years, leaving officials unable to carry out asbestos removal, rewiring and reroofing work that they say is badly needed.

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Nor is there enough money in the royal coffers to redecorate the State Rooms at Buckingham Palace, some of which have not been refurbished since the Queen came to the throne in 1952.

The royal accounts showed that not even the Head of State is immune from the pressure of the credit crunch, with Royal Household costs rising at almost twice the rate of inflation, reversing years of real-term falls.

Answering criticism that the Royal Family does not represent value for money, the Queen’s financial chiefs described the cost of the monarchy — 66p per person in Britain — as less than the price of two pints of milk or a download for an MP3 player.

However, the £40 million quoted in accounts does not include the cost of security provided by the police and Army and the ceremonial duties performed by the Armed Forces. Some critics argue that the true bill to the taxpayer could be £150 million a year.

Staff salaries and garden party bills are among the household costs covered in the annual figure, which has risen by 5 per cent since hitting £38 million in 2006-07.

Sir Alan predicted an extra cost of £32 million by 2018 if the Government did not provide £4 million more per year to halt the deterioration of palace properties. “We were unsuccessful in securing more money from the Government. It was a major disappointment to us. That money was badly needed,” Sir Alan said. “With no increase in funding for 12 years the backlog in essential maintenance has continued to grow.”

The Government has repeatedly rejected requests from Buckingham Palace to bolster the property grant, which has been frozen at £15 million since 1991.

The accounts detailing the contentious area of royal travel revealed that:

It cost taxpayers £18,916 for the Prince of Wales to visit the Black Swan pub in Cumbria, as part of a two-day trip by Royal Train intended to highlight the importance of rural communities.

A 12-day tour of the Caribbean, during which the Prince and the Duchess of Cornwall chartered a luxury yacht, totalled £275,625.

A five-day trip by the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh to the United States in May cost £415,000, including the charter of a helicopter at £23,000 so Her Majesty could watch the Kentucky Derby.

It cost nearly £800,000 to send the Duke of York to foreign destinations including Rio de Janeiro, Miami, Tokyo and Kuala Lumpur, in his capacity as Britain’s special Representative for International Trade and Investment.

Officials blamed mounting maintenance work, and an increase in the number of state visits requested by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and UK Trade and Investment, for the increased costs of running the monarchy.

Use of the Royal Train pushed the travel bill even higher, costing £900,000 for 19 outings, more than £47,000 per single journey.

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