Polly Billington MP (Photography by Dinendra Haria)

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Polly Billington is something of a Westminster lifer – she spent several years as a BBC political reporter before becoming an adviser to Ed Miliband, including during his time as Labour leader.

But now, at the second time of asking, Billington is a player herself rather than a journalist or adviser. And since her election as Labour MP for East Thanet, the 58-year-old has positioned herself as a champion of coastal communities.

Psephologists may argue about why it was that Labour won so many coastal seats. Was it really down to ‘Whitby woman’ switching to Keir Starmer – or just the type of seat profile where the vote split evenly between Reform and Conservatives? If Labour wants to hold any of them, however, it had better deliver meaningful change to coastal voters.

It’s a message the former journalist is pushing hard, while also representing backbench concerns to the party’s leadership as a Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) committee rep. But she is vocal too in her defence of her former boss. Miliband, she says, was right before his time on the key political questions of the day. And, as battle lines begin to be drawn up over AI and the environment, Billington is prepared to question just how much we should sacrifice to energy and water-hungry big tech.

“I set up the Coastal PLP again for the first time since the New Labour government because we’ve now got more coastal Labour MPs than we’ve ever had, even in 1997 and especially in 1945 when Margate, Broadstairs and Ramsgate did not go Labour,” she says, name-checking the towns which make up her seat.

“So, we’re a considerable chunk of the PLP, and that gives us not only an electoral opportunity but also a policy obligation and a delivery obligation,” she adds. “Labour’s majority is partly rooted in those communities and we therefore need to deliver for them.”

“We’ve now got more coastal Labour MPs than we’ve ever had”

Nine out of the top 10 areas in 2025’s English indices of multiple deprivation, she points out, are in coastal areas. Seven of those 10 alone are in Blackpool. Life expectancy can often be significantly lower, and public transport links poorer.

Billington insists the group is not simply playing “deprivation bingo”. Rather, she and her colleagues are arguing that their constituencies contain untapped economic potential and can make a key contribution to the government’s growth mission.

The MPs want to see the government produce a bespoke coastal strategy that recognises the nation’s seaside as a “strategic economic region” in its own right. In the absence of that strategy, less well-off coastal areas like Billington’s risk being lumped in with affluent parts of inland Kent.

“I’ve got more in common with Lowestoft, Scarborough, Blackpool, Worthing, Bournemouth, Truro, than I have with Tunbridge Wells and Sevenoaks,” she says. “That’s why we need to start seeing those places as having a specific economic strategy and approach.”

Billington also wants to see the creation of a coastal minister, though she refuses to say whether she is volunteering for this post herself.

“Listen, those decisions are absolutely ones for the Prime Minister, not me.”

 Would any of her colleagues do a good job of it?

“I’m not going to name anybody, am I?” she replies, before adding: “I am pitching the role, but I think the discussions about personnel need to be done with the people making the decisions – not in The House magazine.”

The Coastal PLP has already secured some wins, she argues, as the recent schools white paper contained a ‘Mission Coastal’ commitment, while the National Cancer Plan pledged to “rebalance cancer and diagnostic medical training places to remote, rural, and coastal areas”. Changes to the Treasury Green Book are a further source of optimism.

Billington now wants to see ministers use “other economic levers” to generate growth on the coast, especially where funding has already been allocated or institutions already established.

“The National Wealth Fund, GB Energy, the British Business Bank. How can they, like the Green Book, be rewired in order to be able to prioritise growth in our coastal communities?”

The MP also hints at possible future tax changes that may benefit the hospitality sector on which many coastal economies depend. Currently, once a business’ taxable turnover exceeds £90,000 in any 12-month period, they are suddenly required to register for VAT. According to Billington, “ministers themselves will acknowledge” that this threshold “drives fraud and keeps businesses small”. 

“I’m not expecting a massive VAT cut. We continue to talk about how the VAT regime, and particularly the VAT threshold, causes unintended consequences and perverse incentives. Ministers are not unalive to that.”

After 15 years as a BBC journalist, Billington left the corporation to become Miliband’s special adviser in Gordon Brown’s government, then worked on Miliband’s leadership campaign, and finally advised him on communications during his first 18 months as leader.

“Ed [Miliband] was right, really early on, about the squeezed middle and intergenerational fairness”

Despite his failure to win the 2015 election – and her own failure to win the marginal seat of Thurrock that year – she remains convinced that Miliband was ahead of his time in his diagnosis of the nation’s ills.

“Ed was right, really early on, about the squeezed middle and intergenerational fairness,” says Billington.

“I remember him doing a speech very early after he’d got elected as leader. He was talking about this anxiety that he had about the country, that people no longer had confidence that their children would have a better life than they did.

“Even some of his greatest supporters were scratching their heads and saying, ‘I don’t know really what you’re talking about’. That’s 16 years ago, and he saw then the big economic trends which were causing these levels of intergenerational unfairness…

“There’s the housing crisis, but not only the housing crisis. Pensions, social care and so forth – those things Ed saw a long time ago.”

Her time working for Miliband also taught her that “being right is not enough – especially in opposition”.

Now a member of the Energy Security and Net Zero Select Committee, Billington is tasked with scrutinising the man she used to advise – and the work of his department, which is trying to achieve its clean power target by 2030.

But concerns have been flagged over recent weeks about whether the government’s plans to rapidly grow the number of AI data centres across the country could put that target at risk. At a January select committee meeting, Billington pressed Miliband’s junior minister, Michael Shanks, on whether the government is open to data centres using gas power to get around grid connection delays. He suggested those discussions were ongoing.

“We’ve got to have a national conversation about this,” says Billington. “You can’t have a situation where you have data centres asking to be powered by gas, which is clearly counter to the government’s overall decarbonisation plan.”

She then raises a more fundamental issue with the UK’s race to become an AI superpower.

“We have to ask some questions about whether we want data centres which take up an enormous amount of water, and an enormous amount of electricity, and don’t create very many jobs.

“We can hurtle towards a data centre future, but is that overall in the best interests of the country? For the kind of jobs that we want, the kind of growth that we want and for our natural resources, like water and how we want to manage our energy supply?”

As well as holding Miliband’s department to account, Billington is also vice-chair of the PLP and sits as one of six Labour parliamentary committee reps, tasked with relaying concerns from the backbenches to the party’s leadership.

What does she make of complaints from longer-serving MPs that she and the other reps – most of whom were first elected in 2024 – are not being robust enough in passing on those complaints to the Chief Whip and the Prime Minister?

“I think anyone who were to be a witness to those meetings certainly wouldn’t come to that conclusion,” she replies. “We feed back, where we can, to the people who raise those questions.

“We have worked on a number of different ways of making sure that we have constructive feedback loops, but I think what is most important about that is that the first people to know about what happens in parliamentary committee are members of the PLP.

“We as backbench committee reps take it extremely seriously to ensure that it is our colleagues who are the first to know, not members of the press.” The now gamekeeper clearly feels the need to keep her former fellow poachers in their place.

Billington is also clear that, following Morgan McSweeney’s departure from No 10, more fundamental changes will be needed to overhaul what some have characterised as the “boys’ club” in Downing Street.

“Personnel is one thing,” she says, “but culture, and understanding about how misogyny works, is another.

“That’s why myself and many of my colleagues in the women’s PLP were delighted to hear Keir say that there was such a thing as structural misogyny.

“We look forward to, and continue to engage with No 10 about, seeing a plan to change things significantly, to challenge that structural misogyny.”

But she emphasises this will be “a lifetime-long battle”, adding: “You don’t smash misogyny by one sacking, one resignation… This is not something that happens quickly or easily, or simply with a few movements or reshuffles.

“This has to be a different way of exercising power, of conducting professional politics, because without that change, we will not have the kind of transformed, fairer, more respectful, equal society that those of who came into politics for the Labour Party actually want to see.”