What are cookies?

Cookies are small text files saved on your phone, tablet or computer when you visit a website. Once a cookie is saved on your computer, only the website that created the cookie can read it.

Cookies are  generally divided into mandatory and non-essential:

  1. Mandatory cookies being those needed to progress through site functionality
  2. Non-essential cookies being used for analytics, cookies from advertisers or third parties, including affiliates and those that identify a user when they returns to the website.

Why are cookies used?

We use cookies to store information about how you use our website and to help provide you with the best browsing experience we can. 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 or for repeat visits.

This site uses a few different types of cookies including some mandatory and non-essential.

Our mandatory cookies:

  • Store your preferences on cookies whilst using our site
  • Make our website work as you’d expect

Our non essential cookies:

  • Enable us to recognise your device so you don’t have to give the same information several times during one task.
  • Improve the speed/security of the site.
  • Allow you to share pages with social networks like Facebook.
  • Help us to understand how people are using our website so that we can improve it for you.
  • Measure how many people are using services, so they can be made easier to use and there’s enough capacity to ensure they work correctly and respond quickly.

The law says we must:

  • Tell you that the cookies are there
  • Explain what the cookies are doing and why
  • Get your permission to store a cookie on your device. (Although we can store cookies on your device if they are strictly necessary for the operation of this site.)

Google Analytics

We use Google Analytics to measure how many people are using our service, the pages you visit and links you click on, so we can make it easier to use and assess the content that is needed. These cookies collect information in an anonymous form. Analysing the anonymised data helps us understand how people interact with our services so we can make them better. There are three possible cookies set by Google Analytics, one used to distinguish users, one is used to distinguish users and one is used to throttle requests (control requests to stop a flooding of information). For more information about Google Analytics visit https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6004245(links to an external website). You can change Google Analytics tracking across all websites by visiting https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout (links to an external website).

Social Media

To support our services, we sometimes embed videos and content from websites such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Pages with this type of embedded content may present cookies from such websites. Similarly, when you use one of the share buttons on this website, a cookie may be set by the service you have chosen to share content through. 

All the links below link to an external website.

Links to other sites

All links are provided for information and convenience only. No responsibility is accepted for any content or programs provided or used in any other websites you open from within this website. We cannot provide more information about the cookies these sites use and suggest the reading of their individual cookie policy pages for further information.

More about Cookies

To find out more about cookies, including how to see what cookies have been set, visit the uk governements legislation pages via this link (links to an external website)