Most websites you visit will use cookies in order to improve your user experience by enabling that website to ‘remember’ you, either for the duration of your visit (using a ‘session cookie’) or for repeat visits (using a ‘persistent cookie’). This policy explains how we do that.

Some websites will also use cookies to enable them to target their advertising or marketing messages based for example, on your location and/or browsing habits.

What are cookies?

Cookies are small data files (normally numbers and letters) which a website may put on your computer or mobile device when you visit a site or page. The cookie will help the website, or another website, to recognise your device the next time you visit. Web beacons or other similar files can also do the same thing. We use the term “cookies” in this policy to refer to all files that collect information in this way.

Cookies do lots of different jobs, like letting you navigate between pages efficiently, storing your preferences, and generally improving your experience of a website. Cookies make the interaction between you and the website faster and easier. If a website doesn’t use cookies, it will think you are a new visitor every time you move to a new page on the site – for example, when you enter your login details and move to another page it won’t recognise you and it won’t be able to keep you logged in.

Certain cookies contain personal information – for example, if you click to “remember me” when logging in, a cookie will store your username. Most cookies won’t collect information that identifies you, and will instead collect more general information such as how users arrive at and use a website, or a user’s general location.

How do we use cookies?

Cookies enable us to identify your device, or you when you have logged in. We use cookies that are strictly necessary to enable you to move around the site or to provide certain basic features. We use cookies to enhance the functionality of the website by storing your preferences, for example. We also use cookies to help us to improve the performance of our website to provide you with a better user experience.

For the avoidance of doubt we do not use cookies to collect personally identifiable information about you.

How to control cookies?

If you don’t want to receive cookies, you can modify your browser so that it notifies you when cookies are sent to it or you can refuse cookies altogether. You can also delete cookies that have already been set.

If you wish to restrict or block web browser cookies which are set on your device then you can do this through your browser settings; the Help function within your browser should tell you how.

If you would like to learn how to remove cookies set on your device, visit: www.aboutcookies.org. Please note that by deleting our cookies or disabling future cookies you may not be able to access certain areas or features of our site.

What cookies are used by this site?

Types of cookie that may be used during your visit to our website are:

Session cookies

Session cookies enable our website to keep track of your movement from page to page so you don’t get asked for the same information you’ve already given to the site. They are automatically deleted when you close your web browser.

Session and permanent cookies

These help our website remember your preferences and settings when you visit again in the future. They therefore speed up and enhance your experience of services or functions offered. For these cookies to work, they are stored on your device and are not deleted when the browser is closed.

Google Analytics’ cookies

Every time a user visits our website, Google Analytics generates anonymous analytics cookies. These cookies can tell us whether or not you’ve visited the site before. Your browser will tell us if you have these cookies, and if you don’t, we generate new ones. This allows us to track how many individual unique users we have, and how often they visit the site.

Advertising cookies

We may also use cookies to assist in targeted advertising. We use cookies to more accurately target advertising to you, to show more relevant ads online. These cookies are anonymous. If you receive one of those cookies, we may then use it to identify you as having visited our site if you later visit other sites that are part of the Google advertising network, and will serve targeted advertising based on this information.

We don’t sell the information collected by cookies, nor do we disclose the information to third parties, except where required by law (for example to government bodies and law enforcement agencies).