HS2 has 167 staff in its PR department costing £8 MILLION a year

HIGH-speed train disaster HS2 has 167 staff in its PR ­department costing £8million a year, The Sun can reveal.

Three of them are working on woke training in their £200,000-a-year Equality, Diversity and Inclusion team, with a vacancy for a fourth.

Last night, critics branded the project “over-bloated, over-budget and off the rails” as the PM again refused to rule out scaling it back.

More than a dozen spin doctors are on the payroll and another five run the firm’s social media, according to a Freedom of Information request.

The total budget last year for HS2 Ltd’s Communications and Stakeholder Engagement Directorate hit £8,086,998, dropping slightly this year to £7,889,489.

Insiders at the publicly-owned HS2 Ltd insist that 84 staff work in community engagement — selling the project to affected locals.

But Buckingham MP Greg Smith hit out: “HS2 have no respect for the taxpayers who fund them.

"Even with all these PR people, my constituents are still in the dark on road closures and other disruptions. HS2 Ltd is over-bloated, over-budget and off the rails.”

An HS2 Ltd spokesperson said: “We have a parliamentary obligation to comprehensively engage with communities affected by construction. This accounts for most of the costs.”

Yesterday, on the first day of the Conservative Party conference in Manchester, PM Rishi Sunak again would not say whether the Manchester leg would be axed.

Levelling Up Secretary Michael Gove described HS2 as an “important project” but added: “We do need to look at value for money”.