Meghan Markle and Prince Harry will launch their own awards rivaling the Queen’s gongs

Meghan Markle and Prince Harry are set to launch a set of awards to rival the Queen’s honours list.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex – who currently reside in an £11million mansion in California – will award individuals, charities and companies they feel champion their favourite causes.

The awards will run alongside the Queen’s own gongs – which include Knighthoods, CBEs, OBEs and MBEs.

Meghan and Harry’s awards will focus specifically on stand-out players in particular fields, court documents seen by The Sun have revealed.

These will include: ‘Charitable service, education, science, literature, racial justice, gender equity, environmental stewardship, youth empowerment, health and mental health.’

The awards scheme will be run by Duke and Duchess’s Archewell foundation – which they first tried to trademark back in March. 

However, lawyers decided the application was unclear and lacked a signature – and they couple were given six months to send another application through.

A second set of forms was filed last week and they are now under review.   

Those who gain titles are decided by honours committees made up of senior civil servants and people independent of the Government.

Some have turned down their award from the Queen for political reasons. 

The Commander of the Order of the British Empire – or CBE is the highest award of the three. It is given to people who play a prominent role nationally or a leading role regionally.

CBEs can also be awarded for people who excel in one particular field. 

The OBE – the Order of the British Empire – recognises outstanding contributions at a local level. 

It can also include people whose roles in one field are so important they become known for them nationally.

An MBE – the Member of the Order of the British Empire – is the lowest ranking of the three and is focused on community contributions.

These will have long-lasting and significant effects and act as inspirational to others.

The two most-senior gongs are the Companion of Honour and Knight or Dames.

The former is awarded for ‘major contribution to the arts, science, medicine, or government lasting over a long period of time’, the Government’s website states.

Knighthoods or Damehoods are given to those who have made a ‘major contribution in any activity’. This is more often than not at a national level.

Some have turned down their award from the Queen for political reasons. 

When poet Benjamin Zephaniah was offered an OBE in 2003 he declined it, condemning the award as a ‘legacy of colonialism’.

Zephaniah, who has Barbadian and Jamaican heritage, said at the time that the word ‘Empire’ ‘reminds me of slavery, it reminds of thousands of years of brutality, it reminds me of how my foremothers were raped and my forefathers brutalised…

‘Benjamin Zephaniah OBE – no way, Mr Blair, no way Mrs Queen. I am profoundly anti-empire.’

Celebrities who have shunned the offer of being made an OBE or MBE include Danny Boyle, Jon Snow and Stephen Hawking.

This year,  campaigners sparked a backlash after demanding the word ’empire’ be removed from the honours. 

They claimed the term has an association with brutality and slavery. 

A senior member of the Commons honours committee said the BLM protests had reignited the debate over the use of the term empire in the honours system.

They told the Sunday Times newspaper: ‘This has been a live issue for some time but there has been heightened discussion about it among members of the committee since the protests.

‘Some members favour the removal of the word “empire” from the existing honours, but others would prefer the introduction of a new medal that better reflects a more diverse 21st-century Britain.’