LONDON (AFP) - British parliamentary authorities monitored nearly 300,000 attempts to access pornography from their computers in the last year, official records show.

The figures, released by the IT department for the Houses of Parliament, cover computers used by more than 1,300 lawmakers, their staff and other parliamentary employees. Officials insisted, however, that the figures were inflated by websites automatically refreshing, while pop-up adverts not requested by users could also have added to the count.

They are also investigating huge variation in the monthly number of attempts to access pornographic websites, with nearly 115,000 attempts in November last year, but only 15 last February.

The data was released on Tuesday in response to a freedom of information request by the Huffington Post UK website.

A spokesman for the House of Commons, the country's lower chamber, said: "We do not consider the data to provide an accurate representation of the number of purposeful requests made by network users due to the variety of ways in which websites can be designed to act, react and interact and due to the potential operation of third party software."