04/09/2013 11:53
UK parliament's porn habit unveiled
More than 300,000 attempts were made to access pornographic websites at the Houses of Parliament in the past year, official records suggest, according to BBC.
It is unclear whether MPs, peers or other staff are responsible, House of Commons officials said.
The figures were not all "purposeful requests" and may have been exaggerated by third-party software and websites that reload themselves, they added.
About 5,000 people work on the parliamentary estate.
The data was released following a Freedom of Information request by Huffington Post UK, which published the story under the headline "Oh Yes, Minister!" on its homepage.
However, the figures vary wildly: in November, there were 114,844 attempts to access websites classed as pornographic, but just 15 in February.
A Commons spokeswoman said: "We do not consider the data to provide an accurate representation of the number of purposeful requests made by network users."
This was because there was a "variety of ways in which websites can be designed to act, react and interact and due to the potential operation of third party software," she said.