Cookies

Our website uses cookies to distinguish you from other users of our website. This helps us to provide you with a good experience when you browse our website and also allows us to improve our site.  

What are cookies?

· These pieces of information are used to improve services for you through, for example: enabling a service to recognise your device so you don’t have to give the same information several times during one task recognising that you may already have given a username and password so you don’t need to do it for every web page requested measuring how many people are using services, so they can be made easier to use and there’s enough capacity to ensure they are fast analysing anonymised data to help us understand how people interact with our services so we can make them better

· You can manage these small files and learn more about them here All About Cookies.org. There’s also a cookies awareness video (below) and further information on how to remove cookies at About Cookies: how to control cookies.

First-party cookies (cookies set by us)

· These are cookies set by our web domain known as ‘first-party’ cookies. Some are necessary to the functionality of the site, others provide information to us that we analyse to monitor and improve the site. These first-party cookies do not store or collect any personal information or anything that make you personally identifiable to us. Typically, the cookies generate a random, unique number to store information about a user.

Cookies for measuring website usage

Google Analytics cookies: _utma, _utmb, _utmc, _utmv, _utmd,_utmz

Purpose: to record how many people are using the website and how they move around the site once they’ve arrived. Google’s privacy policy

Data stored by cookies:

_utma stores each user’s number of visits, time of the first visit, the previous visit and the current visit

_utmb and _utmc checks how long a visitor stays on the site: when a visit starts and ends

_utmz tracks where a visitor came from (search engine, search keyword, link)

_utmv and _utmd track visitor journeys through the site and classifies them into groups

Duration of cookies:

_utma expires two years after your last visit to this site

_utmb expires 30 minutes after your visit, or after 30 minutes of inactivity

_utmc expires at the end of a session (when you close your browser)

_utmz expires six months after it was last set

_utmv (not set) expires immediately

_utmd (not set) expires immediately

Where it is used: all pages of our website

How to control and delete cookies

We will not use cookies to collect personally identifiable information about you. However, if you wish to restrict or block the cookies which are set by our websites, or indeed any other website, you can do this through your browser settings. The ‘Help’ function within your browser should tell you how.

Alternatively, you may wish to visit the About Cookies website, which contains comprehensive information on how to do this on a wide variety of browsers. You will also find details on how to delete cookies from your machine as well as more general information about cookies.

Please be aware that restricting functionality cookies may have an impact upon the functionality of our website.

If you wish to view your cookie code, just click on a cookie to open it. You’ll see a short string of text and numbers. The numbers are your identification card, which can only be seen by the server that gave you the cookie.

For information on how to do this on the browser of your mobile phone you will need to refer to your handset manual. To opt-out of third-parties collecting any data regarding your interaction on our website, please refer to their websites for further information.

Log Files

We use IP addresses to analyse trends, administer the site, track user’s movement on the site, and gather broad demographic information for aggregate use.