…the Policy Forum, if it is to succeed, will not do so through spectacle or controversy. In the short term, its success will be measured in the quality of the conversations it facilitates, the humility of participants to ask questions, and the freedom of experts to answer them…
In brief
The forum
The forum is the defining and eponymous offering of our society. More than a single place or a kind of event, it is the guiding principle behind what we do: experts and students sit as peers in a discussion where there is far more to gain from listening to and understanding one another than from scoring points in an argument.
Expertise and experience guide but do not dominate the discussion, in which all participants are encouraged but not compelled to contribute. Where challenges and rebuttals are made, participants engage with the idea, not the individual. Participants and experts should approach the discussion with curiosity rather than hostility and assume that everyone is acting in good faith.
Though speakers inevitably have an agenda, this is likely to be one of understanding and communicating rather than influencing or misleading. For this reason, experts with a range of perspectives and experience are carefully chosen from outside the world of frontline politics, and participants in the discussion do not ‘take sides’ or otherwise state their affiliations.
The Chatham House rule
The other cornerstone of the society is that all participants and speakers are bound by the Chatham House rule, where they may use any information from a discussion but must not disclose the speaker.
This rule is to the benefit of experts, who may be incumbent or former high-profile public figures who may fear the consequences of speaking publicly on sensitive issues of national or international significance. In particular, civil servants are duty-bound to be publicly politically neutral, which limits their participation in the other political forums available to students like the Cambridge Union and the national news debate.
The CHR allows all voices to participate in our discussions, no matter their business outside the ‘walls’ of the forum. The CHR also contributes to a less adversarial nature of discussion than students and experts may find elsewhere. Because discussions are not recorded or transcribed and are never made public, there is nothing to be gained from political point-scoring or performative disagreement. Breaches of the CHR, should they arise, will be investigated thoroughly by the committee.
Issues
‘Policy’ is a deliberately vague term, encompassing all the ways in which public bodies attempt to solve or address the issues facing society and the natural world. This omnipresent nature of policy is reflected in the many possible careers in policymaking and therefore must be reflected in the issues addressed by the Policy Forum.
‘Wicked’ problems are the hardest to address as they involve many interconnected stakeholders who may have conflicting interests, are often poorly defined and understood, and do not have a clear endpoint. These problems are among the most interesting to experts and students, including climate change, homelessness, and food insecurity, and are rightly a major concern of any society dedicated to policy discussion. However, career policymakers are far more likely to be devoted to ‘tame’ and ‘messy’ problems like improving and funding public services and infrastructure, delivering healthcare, and protecting the natural environment from immediate threats.
Similarly, policymaking takes scope over different domains, including the local, national, regional, and global; none more or less noble than the others. The Policy Forum will look to give all these kinds of issues the attention they deserve.
Every year, hundreds of Cambridge graduates will enter the world of policymaking in one way or another.
Perhaps as civil servants or political advisers, they will have a direct impact on the policies that shape our lives and our world. Perhaps as consultants, they will be the trusted experts to politicians and officials. A handful will end up as politicians themselves, and fewer still may become the leaders and faces of policy in the UK and worldwide.
For all the merits of a Cambridge education, it does little to prepare students for this brutal, fast-moving, and consequential world of policymaking. Good intentions and a strong sense of public service are important but insufficient qualities of policymakers. Even – especially – with the issues closest to us, which we feel we understand deeply and personally, it is possible to suffer from a tunnelled view of the problem, and therefore a distorted view of the possible solutions.
Coupled with a lack of understanding about how the policy process works and the systems and stakeholders that push and pull it in its various directions, and we begin to look rather ill-qualified to enter this world, despite what our CVs and public perception might say.
The Trinity Policy Programme
This gap – between what we learn in our studies and what we may put into practice as future policymakers – motivated the inaugural Trinity Policy Programme in 2025, which saw Trinity students from diverse academic and personal backgrounds meet with and learn from policymakers and academics who have participated in the policy process in the various ways one can.
Some worked at the heart of the Civil Service, moving through government departments in place and political circumstances in time, navigating a volatile realm where many different interests collide. Others advised policymakers and civil servants from the outside, where they are privileged to measure and scrutinise the fruits of public policies, removed from the grisly factory in which they were produced. Everyone who contributed to the many discussions, including students, brought a unique and invaluable perspective to the issues discussed.
The principles of the Policy Forum
The Policy Programme was a great success and two of its defining features remain at the heart of the Policy Forum it engendered. The first was the ‘forum’ itself: a space for open discussion where experts and students contribute freely, sitting as peers around a single table, where the goal is not to win arguments but to understand the forces shaping them. Nor is there a view to building consensus; rather, we want to exhaust the expertise and different perspectives in the room so each person can draw their own informed conclusion.
The second was the adoption of the ‘Chatham House rule’, which allows participants to use any information from a discussion but may not reveal the speaker or their affiliation. Practically, this means that experts and participants may always speak freely without fear of being quoted publicly for their contribution to the discussion. This makes for a distinctively warm and open atmosphere, in contrast to the adversarial nature of many other political forums available to students.
Therefore, the Policy Forum, if it is to succeed, will not do so through spectacle or controversy. In the short term, its success will be measured in the quality of the conversations it facilitates, the humility of participants to ask questions, and the freedom of experts to answer them. If, one day, its alumni walk the corridors of power a little better prepared, that will simply be a welcome bonus. But we must not get ahead of ourselves.
Alfie Arthur, President 2025-26
Committee
Section coming soon