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Chief Commercial Officer Ruth Todd CBE, 54, earned \u00a3313,055 and lives the charming village of Ratley outside Banbury in Oxfordshire.<\/p>\n
Unlike the hundreds of dwellings that have been flattened to make way for HS2 none of the executives\u2019 properties is troubled by the new line.<\/p>\n
Mr Mackinlay described the salaries of the top directors and their many highly-paid colleagues at HS2 as shameful. He said: \u201cI have never seen a project overrun so enormously with such an enormous senior management team salary bill.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is purely shameful and the British taxpayer is right to ask some very probing questions about what has gone wrong.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added that the project had been doomed to massive cost overruns from \u201cfrom its inception\u201d.<\/p>\n
He said: \u201cIt fell off its own tracks almost immediately. I know it is a complex issue, they\u2019ve come across a lot of archaeological problems and all sorts of stuff on the way.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt has expanded under its own weight, often quite rightly because of local concerns and a lot of that was not entirely foreseen.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut effective oversight has been lost on this. What we\u2019ve ended up with is not an inter-city train service at all. It\u2019s a nice to have trinket that has lost its economic reality.\u201d<\/p>\n
He added that HS2 highlighted how planning bureaucracy had made it almost impossible to deliver large infrastructure projects within the UK.<\/p>\n
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Don’t miss… <\/strong> He said: \u201cThe cost overrun shows we have created planning and bureaucratic mechanisms that binds everything up.<\/p>\n \u201cNo other country on the planet has tied itself up in so many knots when it comes to implementing big infrastructure projects and it makes me fear for the future of the country.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are coming to a standstill and we need something very very substantial to change.\u201d<\/p>\n Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg also objected to the salaries being paid and said the taxpayer had a right to expect private-sector levels of competence for such generous remuneration.<\/p>\n He said: \u201cThe idea behind paying lots of money to people is that you will then get the virtues of the private sector brought to bear.<\/p>\n \u201cBut in fact you haven\u2019t, you\u2019ve just got very high salaries for people in the public sector, who haven\u2019t run the project very well. And that doesn\u2019t really help anybody. It\u2019s been very expensive to the taxpayer.<\/p>\n \u201cI do not object to paying high salaries to people who do a good job but paying into the millions for people who are running a project that\u2019s massively over budget is not sensible. It\u2019s not value for money.\u201d<\/p>\n John O\u2019Connell, chief executive of the TaxPayers\u2019 Alliance, said: \u201cThese salaries will anger taxpayers who see the spiralling costs of HS2.<\/p>\n \u201cHS2 bosses are among the highest paid public servants in the country.<\/p>\n \u201cThe government should scrap this white elephant and save cash on these bloated salaries as a bonus.\u201d<\/p>\n The Prime Minister is said to be concerned at the level of remuneration of top people at HS2 and is \u201cnot prepared\u201d to allow the costs of the project to escalate to predicted levels in excess of \u00a3100billion.<\/p>\n Rishi Sunak is also angry at claims that the line had been deliberately \u201coverengineered\u201d with miles more tunnels than originally planned and the longest railway viaduct in the UK included with a two mile span across the Colne Valley north west of London.<\/p>\n Executives were accused of behaving like \u201ckids with the golden credit card\u201d in their attitudes to spending on the project according to one official.<\/p>\n The source told The Times: \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n It is understood that the cost of Phase 1, London to Birmingham, will \u201cabsolutely bust\u201d the most pessimistic contingency plans, of \u00a344.6billion.<\/p>\n When the project was announced the budget for its entirety was about \u00a330billion and it is now expected to cost more than \u00a3100billion, even allowing for the fact that a line from Birmingham to Leeds has been scrapped.<\/p>\n Sunak is considering cancelling the northern leg of HS2 between Birmingham and Manchester and terminating the line at Old Oak Common in west London rather than in Euston to save money.<\/p>\n He wants to reallocate savings to other regional transport projects including Northern Powerhouse Rail (NPR) between Manchester and Leeds.<\/p>\n He is expected to delay a decision until the autumn statement in the face of a backlash from senior Conservatives.<\/p>\n Former Tory Chancellor Lord Hammond of Runnymede, said that the project risked becoming a white elephant if it was not finished and Patrick McLoughlin, a former transport secretary, said that scaling it back would be \u201ccompletely wrong\u201d.<\/p>\n It means that two former Tory prime ministers, three former chancellors and a former transport secretary are all opposed to cutting the line short.<\/p>\n An HS2 spokesperson said: \u201cHS2 is Europe\u2019s biggest infrastructure project and it is necessary to employ people with the right level of expertise to deliver it successfully.<\/p>\n \u201cHS2 Ltd is committed to controlling costs and takes its responsibility towards value-for-money very seriously.<\/p>\n \u201cExecutive salaries are signed off by the Department for Transport and Treasury. Remuneration is also benchmarked against comparable organisations and managed in line with the government\u2019s public sector pay policy.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Crazy to scrap the one part of HS2 that is actually needed, says Stephen Pollard[COMMENT] <\/strong><\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/cdn.images.express.co.uk\/img\/dynamic\/139\/590x\/secondary\/4980063.jpg?r=1695756476579\")
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