Miriam Hale
Former complaints officer. Reads extracts and files, facilitates mapping days, and writes the member reading notes.
The studio
Three readers of queues, working from Wade Lane.
Desktop Pathline grew out of complaints work in Lancashire district offices, not out of a product pitch. We still take only as many extracts as we can read twice.
Why the work exists
Members are asked to account for missed bins, open repairs, and complaint clusters using figures that were built for a different conversation — a performance clinic, a contractor meeting, an internal huddle. The figures are not false. They are the wrong object for a chamber. We draw a second object: maps, timelines, and tables that keep codes apart, name the gaps, and still fit on a blotter.
The United Kingdom’s local bodies already employ analysts. We do not replace them. We sit with an extract they are too busy to walk through before a date that will not move, and we leave a pack they can defend.
How we work
We agree a service family and a window. We refuse screenshots as a source. We print uncertainty. We will pause a review if the extract cannot be reconciled to a published figure within two working days, because a pretty map that disagrees with the official table helps nobody in an ombudsman file.
On-site days are ordinary: a hub, a depot meeting room, a walk at the mouth of a cul-de-sac. Saltcotes is our base; the committee room is almost always yours.
People
Who you will meet
Owen Pritchard
Draws the maps and committee sheets. Trained in cartographic draughting; refuses to shade a ward whose extract is incomplete.
Priya Nair
Checks counts, hashes identifiers when you supply them, and walks waste rounds when the footnote needs a street, not a guess.