What is a cookie?
Cookies are small text files or pieces of information that are stored on your computer or mobile device when you visit our website. A cookie contains the name of the website and a value, which can be used for a variety of purposes.
“Session” cookies are held in memory and only exist during your visit to our website. “Persistent” cookies are stored on your device until they expire, and can therefore be used by our website on your subsequent visits. All persistent cookies have a “lifetime” which dictates how long the cookie will remain active on your device.
Our cookies do not contain any data that could be used to identify you personally.
What do we use cookies for?
We use cookies to make our website easier to use and to make the content you see more relevant. Cookies allow us to record important information about your visit and this helps us to make the website better for you, and for other visitors.
We also use cookies to create statistics that help us improve the structure and content of our website. We cannot identify you personally from this information.
Third party cookies
We use a number of systems that are provided by external suppliers. In some cases they may also set cookies on your device on our behalf when you visit our website.
Managing cookies
All modern web browsers allow you to control the use of cookies on your device. You are also able to delete existing cookies and other stored data on your device should you wish to do so.
Instructions for Google Chrome
Instructions for Internet Explorer
Instructions for Microsoft Edge
Cookies improve your experience on our website and we encourage you to leave them enabled.
Our cookies
Essential cookies
These are necessary for our website to work. If you choose to disable cookies for our website you will not be able to use many of the features.
Examples include:
- Session cookies that remember your actions as you navigate our websites.
- Security cookies that check the validity of your actions during your visit helping to keep our websites and services safe and secure.
Analytics and Performance cookies
These cookies help us collect information about how you use our websites over time; the areas you visit, the time spent on our websites and issues and errors you may encounter. This information helps us to continually improve the information we provide and the performance of our websites and services.
Features and Services cookies
We use features and services provided by third parties that may set cookies on our behalf. Commonly such services are embedded on our web pages to provide functionality such as video players and social media sharing tools. These third party services may set their own cookies which we cannot control or access.
For example these services allow us to provide a personalised experience based on your previous visits or location, allow you to easily comment on our blog posts using your Facebook account, to engage with social tools or to conveniently prefill fields in our online forms.
Advertising and marketing cookies
These cookies are used to measure advertising effectiveness and to deliver content that is relevant to your interests. They may be used to deliver behavioural/targeted advertising on other websites you visit or to highlight content and services we feel are of interest to you based on your activity on our websites and/or other websites within our advertising networks.