120 council staff are disciplined over porn and emails

More than 120 London council staff have been caught downloading pornography or sending inappropriate emails at work.

In the past five years, employees have spent many hours trawling sexually explicit web pages, using gambling, gaming or auction sites and forwarding inappropriate material to colleagues.

Social networking sites Facebook and Bebo, eBay, Thomas Cook, gambling website Poker Room and shopping sites such as Argos, John Lewis and Lastminute.com are among the most frequently accessed web pages.

Most of the staff cautioned had been caught forwarding emails that included racist, homophobic or sexist jokes.

In one case, a planning officer added a naked photograph of his wife to a swingers website. He logged on each morning to see how many hits she had received. In another, a council secretary was cautioned for spending up to three hours a day playing poker.

Brent council disciplined 23 staff, the largest number for any London borough. Four resigned and two were sacked.

The most serious case involved a council chief who used an internet chatroom to groom a 14-year-old girl before posting her details and photograph on an escort agency website.

Keith Gosling, 47, of Welwyn Garden City, was arrested at work after police found naked pictures of young girls on his computer. He was sentenced to four years in jail for having sex with a minor and taking and distributing indecent photos of a child.

A Brent spokesman said Gosling, who used a pseudonym to chat to the girl from his office computer, was arrested after an internal investigation. He said that after the case, which came to light in 2003, the council clamped down on what sites could be accessed from work.

He added: "Brent council has had a stringent policy governing misuse of the internet but software to enforce this policy was only introduced in 2004.

"Until then was it possible to access some websites which are now barred. In late 2004, blocking software was introduced making it impossible to access sites in certain categories, such as violent, sexually explicit or gambling sites. We take reports of the abuse of email and the internet very seriously and always follow them up and take the appropriate action."

The figures were released to the Evening Standard after a Freedom of Information request.

In most councils the bulk of staff were given internet access in 2002, after the introduction of websites advertising services.

Since then, 23 council workers across the capital have lost their jobs for inappropriate use of work computers. A further 102 received verbal or written warnings.

Sarah Robertson, spokeswoman for the Internet Watch Foundation, said it was up to individual companies to block sites that should not be accessed during work hours.

Mike Haigh, Windows marketing manager for Microsoft, said: "There are lots of ways to stop employees looking at inappropriate material."