Jo Coles has been answering questions from concerned councillors.
Senior Councillors and Directors in North Yorkshire have been discussing the effect of the Langdale Fire on already-tight budgets.
The region's deputy Mayor for Policing, Fire and Crime, Jo Coles, has sought to clarify the situation:
" I'm not aware that any decisions were ever being made around budgets because I was asking about that at the time. We wanted to ensure that we weren't making the fire service feeling like they had to make any decisions based on affordability. These were decisions that would be made around the nature of the incident and ensuring that we had cover across the region.
"Belling was applied for very early on in the process. I assume that in terms of the finances and the reporting on that, in terms of the wider costs are things that will be made public at the point at which they're finalised, but it is something that we are monitoring and obviously when the finance reports are available, panel can have sight of those."
She admits there was some pre-planning to ensure resources were in place though:
"When we increased the precept in a kind of unprecedented way this year, and panel will know because you were part of that consultation process around the fire precept this year. It was a significant increase to precept because we were worried about the reserves. So actually, thankfully the reserves had been shored up as a result of the precept increase that took place this year.
"I think when we, the mayor and I took that decision in the early beginning of this year. We were alive, and I think I probably said to panel at the time, we were very alive to the risks in the fire budget in terms of that long-term financial resilience of the service. I don't think we anticipated it being required quite so quickly as it then was this summer, but we were alive to the risks of a major incident and what that would mean for the service."
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