Engine manufacturer Rolls Royce sacked three employees at its plant in East Kilbride, Scotland last week after the men were caught downloading porn from the internet, according to a report in the Daily Record newspaper.

Following a company-wide investigation into staff misuse of the internet the three men were fired. Other employees have received warnings for misusing the company internet while they should have been working, although they had not been accessing porn.

According to the report a company spokesman confirmed that the dismissals had taken place, and commented:

"We believe we have taken fair but firm action. The material, although inappropriate, was not illegal and therefore the police were not informed."

An un-named employee told the Daily Record:

"The three guys obviously didn't know they were being watched and had no one to blame but themselves for getting the bullet.

"We all know there is a monitoring system and it is simply stupid to access hard porn."

The action by Rolls Royce comes at the same time as statistics suggest that a surprisingly high percentage of employees do access porn at work.

In a web usage survey published by Websense, a provider of employee internet management software, 22% of male employees and 12% of female employees admitted that they had visited a porn site at work. Of these, 13% of the men admitted that it was intentional. All of the women said that they had accessed the site unintentionally.

The Websense survey can be found here

We are processing your request. \n Thank you for your patience. An error occurred. This could be due to inactivity on the page - please try again.