London: Her father is Britain’s tenth richest man with a £8.5 billion fortune, but Lady Edwina Grosvenor’s children could miss out on a share of the family fortune — for their own good.

Lady Edwina, the second daughter of the Duke of Westminster, and her husband, TV historian Dan Snow, are considering giving all their money away.

They believe it could benefit their offspring because too much money can be bad for the soul.

Snow, 35, said: “It may be that we form an arrangement whereby our children don’t grow up wealthy. My wife and I are talking to a lot of people about it. We’re working a lot of things out.”

He said of his wife: “She has embarked on a career in philanthropy. She gives a lot of money away at the moment.

“The question is, does she give away everything? And that’s something that’s very much being talked about.”

Lady Edwina’s father, the sixth Duke of Westminster, owns 300 acres of Mayfair and Belgravia and much of Oxford Street in central London.

Her mother Natalia is one of Prince William’s godmothers, and Lady Edwina is a goddaughter of Princess Diana.

Snow’s father is veteran broadcaster Peter Snow and he is a cousin of Channel 4 news presenter Jon Snow. Dan Snow married Lady Edwina at a low-key wedding in 2010. They have a daughter Zia, three, another child due soon, and live on the edge of the New Forest.

Explaining the thinking behind the children’s possible lack of inheritance, Snow said: “There’s a great quote from the Scottish entrepreneur Tom Hunter. He thinks it’s a good idea to leave kids an amount of money that means they can do something but not so much that they can do nothing.

“You can raise them above subsistence and you can allow them to think about a career that isn’t hugely financially rewarding.”

Lady Edwina, 32, was born at Eaton Hall, her family’s 10,872-acre country estate in Cheshire. But despite the family’s vast wealth, her parents sent her and her three siblings to a private coeducational day school on the Wirral, rather than a single-sex boarding school.

She went on to attain a degree in criminology and sociology. A fervent prison reformer, she is a trustee of The Clink Charity, which sets up quality restaurants in prisons that give inmates a chance to learn how to cook, serve and perform front-of-house duties.

Lady Edwina has previously told how her interest in the troubled lives of others began when she was 12.

“I suddenly realised how much money my family had. It coincided with my father becoming terrified that my sister Tamara, who is two years older, and I would spend all our money on drugs,” she said in an interview last year. “He took us to a drug rehabilitation centre in Liverpool to meet heroin addicts and see what their lives were really like.”

She also told how she learnt `great wealth can’t buy good health and bad things happen to everyone’ after her father had a breakdown caused by depression and her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer in the late 1990s.

Lady Edwina has also admitted to having `an identity crisis’ after leaving university because “I had so much money that I knew I would never have to work”.

She said: “It made me unlike nearly everyone else in the country and was quite isolating. After a while, I told myself to see my wealth as a great gift that I should put to good use.”