When the judge in the recent Barrow Borough Council manslaughter trial acquitted the authority, there seemed to be a collective sigh of relief across local government. But legal experts are warning local authorities that the day when a council could find itself in the dock on corporate manslaughter charges might not be too far away. The case against Barrow failed because the trial judge accepted that Gillian Beckingham, head of the council's design services group, was not sufficiently senior to be identified as the controlling mind of the local authority, according to Sarah Taylor, an associate at the nationwide firm of solicitors Eversheds.
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