The former chief executive of the High Speed Two (HS2) railway earned over £650,000 before his departure, it has been revealed.
According to HS2 Ltd’s annual report, Mark Thurston was paid £652,569 over his final year, including a £34,345 bonus. This marked a small downgrade on the prior year’s £676,763.
Thurston was the embattled project’s longest serving chief executive before he announced his resignation in September and has regularly topped the government’s “highest earners” list in recent years. Another highly paid executive was HS2’s chief commercial officer Ruth Todd, who also left in December and earned a pay packet of £259,457, including a £31,104 bonus.
Thurston’s exit came shortly before former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s bombshell announcement that the northern section of the route between Birmingham and Manchester would be axed amid soaring costs and delays.
The government also cut back plans for HS2’s Euston station, the proposed terminus of the route. It is currently uncertain whether the high speed rail project will terminate at the Central London hub or at Old Oak Common, a replacement station in the capital’s western suburb.
The annual report disclosed more than £2bn in costs associated with Sunak’s decision. HS2 has written off £1.1bn in costs incurred during over “Phase Two,” which refers to the now-defunct northern leg plans.
HS2 Ltd also revealed £2.1bn in one-off costs associated with scaling back the railway.
A spokesperson for HS2 Ltd said: “We are required to declare spending on the project that HS2 Ltd is no longer expected to gain any economic benefit from.
“In this case, losses relate entirely to work delivered on the northern phase of HS2, which was cancelled by the previous government, and the former design of the high-speed station at Euston.”
City A.M. revealed this month that HS2 Ltd is consulting on a sweeping round of job cuts and major restructuring in a bid to keep costs down.