Brit lawmakers enjoy online gambling websites

UK parliamentary staff takes a great interest in online gaming websites, according to official records released under the Freedom of Information Act and obtained by The Express newspaper this week.

Politicians and their staff members visited internet gaming and gambling websites 4 million times over the past year, the Palace of Westminster computer records show, with interest shown in everything from casino and sports sites to fantasy football and more innocuous general gaming and trivia venues.

Almost 26,000 users were busy as virtual farmers on free gaming sites.

The Express claims that between January 2013 and January 2014 there were a total of 3,844,636 attempts to access gaming websites from Parliamentary IT servers; Sporcle had 457,368 hits and fantasy.premierleague.com 86,157.

About 5,000 staff – ­including more than 1,100 MPs and peers – work at Westminster.

A Commons spokesman pointed out that the statistics may include pop-up adverts, which are recorded as page views.

He said: “Some sites use an auto-refresh tool which keeps reloading elements of a page without the user clicking any buttons.”

Westminster computer users have also been trawling the internet looking for love, the newspaper reports, noting that parliamentary lawmakers or their staff members accessed Out Of Town Affairs 52,375 times in seven months last year.

In one month Out of Town Affairs received 289 hits a day, making it more popular than the official Treasury, Ministry of Justice and Department for Education websites.

Porn also featured among parliamentary visits, with 300,000 visits.