London: Over 300,000 attempts were made to access pornographic websites from the British Parliament in the past year, according to official figures. Following a Freedom of Information (FOI) request from the 'Huffington Post UK', the House of Commons authorities acknowledged that users of the Parliamentary Network servers have repeatedly attempted to access websites classed as pornographic between May 2012 and July 2013.

It remains unclear whether MPs, peers or other staff are responsible, House of Commons officials said. According to the figures, the number of attempts to access pornographic websites via the parliamentary network peaked for 2012 at 114,844 last November and at 55,552 in April for 2013. At least 5,000 people are estimated to be working on the parliamentary estate.

Parliamentary officials indicated that the figures would be inflated by websites automatically refreshing and thus adding to recorded access attempts. Additionally, pop-up or embeddable content like videos and pictures could have a knock-on effect on the number of access attempts recorded. "We do not consider the data to provide an accurate representation of the number of purposeful requests made by network users," a House of Commons spokesperson said.

British Prime Minister David Cameron had announced in July that most households in the UK would have pornography blocked by their internet provider unless they chose to receive it as part of an overall crackdown. The UK's biggest internet service providers have agreed to the filters scheme meaning it should cover 95 per cent of homes.