OFF THE RAILS! 'SHAMEFUL' SALARIES OF HS2 FAT CATS

MASSIVE salaries given to executives running the ballooning £100billion HS2 railway project have been blasted as "shameful".

- Robert Kellaway

Three fat cat bosses were handed a total exceeding £1.3million - while more than 40 picked up at least £150,000 each.

Angry Tory MP Craig Mackinlay said: "I have never seen a project overrun so enormously with such an enormous senior management team salary bill. The British taxpayer is right to ask some very probing questions about what has gone wrong."

HS2 chief executive Mark Thurston, 56, who is leaving the troubled scheme after six years, enjoyed a pay package worth £676,763 a year. He lives in a £1.4million five-bedroom house in Surrey. Chief financial officer Alan Foster, 52, is paid £370,449 - he lives in a £1.6million home within a gated cul-de-sac near Birmingham.

While HS2 chief commercial officer Ruth Todd CBE, 54, picks up £313,055 and lives in Warwickshire.

Unlike hundreds of dwellings flattened to make way for HS2, the trio's properties are not troubled by the delayed high-speed line.

One official hit out at management attitudes towards spending on the project, telling The Times: "It seems that the mantra of HS2 bosses has been to massively overspend all along to make it too big to kill.

"From the start they were like kids with the golden credit card."

Outraged South Thanet MP Mr Mackinlay said of the dozens of high salaries: "It is purely shameful.

Doomed

"I'm left attempting to paraphrase Winston Churchill, by saying that never in the history of British rail projects has so much been paid by so many, to so many...for so little."

He added the controversial project had been doomed to massive cost overruns "from its inception".