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Tom Maitland is Senior Manager for Financial Services Policy at the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), where he works on capital markets, sustainable finance, and economic policy. When he began his Policy Fellowship in 2020, he was a Senior Associate in PwC’s Global Fiscal Policy Team, working with policymakers on fiscal policy, public finance and net zero. Here, he describes how the CSaP Fellowship has helped shape his thinking and his work.
As I’ve moved from PwC to the CBI, a theme throughout my career has been the interaction between economic policy and net zero. It has been incredibly helpful to build relationships with academics through the Fellowship, and to remain engaged with CSaP as my career has evolved.
At PwC my work in this area involved helping policymakers in the UK and abroad understand, and where possible estimate, the potential impacts of decarbonisation (e.g. through asset stranding) on the economy and public finances. Whereas at the CBI, I mainly work on sustainable finance regulation and public-private collaboration to finance the transition. I am currently seconded to the Transition Finance Market Review, which focuses on the challenges specific to financing a credible net zero transition in hard-to-abate and high emitting areas of the global economy.
Like most policy professionals, I often find myself working on complex, multidisciplinary challenges, with less time than you might like. For me, the main benefit of the CSaP Fellowship was the opportunity to step away from the day-to-day and to gain broad exposure to academics working across many disciplines. It provided a chance to reflect on challenges I’d worked on in a wholly different context.
For example, I met with academics in the Centre for Climate Repair. Having only been involved in policy work relating to emissions reduction, it was illuminating to learn about greenhouse gas removal and restoring broken climate systems. But also, despite working on decarbonisation, as an economic policy advisor I tend to spend more time with economists than engineers. I appreciated this opportunity to broaden my horizons and to learn about current research frontiers in fields I was unfamiliar with.
When I started the Fellowship, my exposure to working with academics was limited to bringing them in on consulting projects to offer technical input. But I now feel much more comfortable engaging academics in a variety of ways, from challenging current policy to framing research questions to fine-tuning policy details. Being able to work with academics throughout the policy process has no doubt improved my capabilities as a policy advisor.
"The Fellowship has developed my understanding of the role that academia can play in policy making. The bridge between the policy ecosystem and academia can be hard to cross, but CSaP plays a vital role in facilitating those exchanges."
CSaP runs a series of weekly policy seminars for Fellows which I found to be particularly interesting. Each seminar brings together an academic expert with a policy maker, applying their ideas in sometimes surprising ways. These weren’t necessarily directly applicable to my own work, but I always found them enriching.
The tailored programme of meetings was particularly beneficial for me. The analytical methods applied by policy analysts can be somewhat downstream of academia. I found it incredibly valuable to learn about novel approaches to economic analysis of public policy. A few examples standout.
I met with Dr Matthew Agarwala, an Economist in the Bennett Institute, to learn about his work on climate change and fiscal sustainability. The physical and transition-related impacts of climate change pose substantial macroeconomic risks, with implications for debt sustainability, sovereign creditworthiness and public finances. Having applied more conventional tools of fiscal sustainability analysis at both PwC and the CBI, learning about Matthew’s work expanded the tools I could apply to analyse the interaction between climate change and economic policy.
Meeting with Dimitri Zhengelis, a Senior Associate in the Bennett Institute for Public Policy in Cambridge, was a chance to learn about his work to make the case for rapid decarbonisation. I had briefly worked with Dimitri at the beginning of my career and was already familiar with some of his work, but this was a unique chance to have a lengthy conversation about what he was working on.
"These meetings, and many others, gave me a deeper understanding of some of the ideas moving between academia and the policy world. It gave me the impetus to approach my day-to-day differently."
I didn’t quite know what to expect from the from CSaP Fellowship, and it was unlike any programme I had participated in before. I certainly learnt a lot in substance, built a lot of relationships, and feel more tapped into relevant research. It was also a prompt for reflection on the many opportunities a career in policy can offer, one of them being the ability to take forward the insights from research and try to do something about them.