Britain unveiled plans to bolster protection for children online, including a mandatory requirement for sex offenders to hand over their email addresses to the police or face five years in jail. The new legislation, which will come into effect later this year, applies to more than 30,000 people registered on the sex offenders' list.

Offenders who fail to give up their email address to police, or handover a false one, face up to five years in jail.

Paedophiles' email addresses will also be passed to social networking sites such as Facebook, Bebo and MySpace to prevent them preying on children.

"We have some of the strictest controls on sex offenders in the world to protect our children," the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said in a statement.

"We are working with police, industry and charities to create a hostile environment for sex offenders on the internet, and are determined to make it as hard for predators to strike online as in the real world," Smith said.

The government is keen to prevent paedophiles from using social networking websites to groom children to be sexual abuse victims, the Home Office said.

The Home Office move comes amid growing concerns that sex offenders are using social networking sites to groom youngsters.

A recent study found that more than a quarter of eight to 11-year-olds with internet access claim to have a profile on a social networking website, despite the existence of pre-teen restrictions.

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