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What is a Cookie?

A cookie is a small piece of text stored on your computer, phone or other device which you use to browse the web. Cookies keep track of your movements within the site, help you resume where you left off, remember your registered login, theme selection, preferences, and other customization functions.

Cookies usually don't contain much information except for the web address of the website that created the cookie, the duration of the cookie's abilities and effects, and a random number. Due to the little amount of information a cookie contains, it usually cannot be used to reveal your identity or personally identifying information.

More information about cookies can be found on www.allaboutcookies.org

Understanding how and why we use cookies

We use cookies on our site (and any sub-domain) to create the most effective website possible for our customers. Cookies allow us to view how our audience is using the website and we use this data in order to make improvements for the user (for example by seeing which pages are most popular).

The way we collect information about your visit to our website means that no-one is personally identified.

We will not associate any data gathered from this site by cookies with information which identifies you from any source. If we do want to collect information which identifies you personally through our website, we will be clear about this and tell you at the point your information is collected. We will make it clear when we collect personal information and will explain what we intend to do with it.

We encourage you to accept the cookies our website uses as they not only help us to improve the user experience for you and many others, they also help to make the website work more efficiently.

How you can manage your cookies

The browsers of most computers, smartphones and other web-enabled devices are typically set up to accept cookies. If you wish to amend your cookie preferences for this website or any other websites, you can do this through your browser settings. Your browser's 'help' function will tell you how to do this.

However, please remember that cookies are often used to enable and improve certain functions on our website. If you choose to switch certain cookies off, it is likely to affect how our website works.

More information about how to disable cookies, visit www.allaboutcookies.org and further guidance on the new EU e-Privacy Law can be found on the Information Commissioner's Office website.

What types of Cookie are there?

  1. Strictly necessary cookies

    These cookies are essential in order to enable you to move around a website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of a website - i.e. logging into an account.

    We use these strictly necessary cookies...

    COOKIE NAME DESCRIPTION
    cookie_note This cookie is used by this site to record whether you have seen the cookie policy notification so that you aren't continually shown it on every page. It expires when you close the browser.
  2. Performance cookies

    These cookies collect information about how visitors use a website, for instance which pages visitors go to most often, and if they get error messages from web pages. These cookies don't collect information that identifies a visitor. All information these cookies collect is aggregated and therefore anonymous. They are only used to improve how a website works.

    We use these performance cookies...

    COOKIE NAME DESCRIPTION
    __utma This cookie is used by Google Analytics so that we can get statistics about usage of our website. This lets us know how many times you come to the site on different occasions and when your first visit was. It does not store personal information.
    __utmb & __utmc These cookies are used by Google Analytics so that we can get statistics about usage of our website.These let us know specific information about a single visit to our site. They do not store personal information.
  3. Functionality Cookies

    These cookies allow a website to remember choices you make such as text size, fonts and other parts of web pages that you can customise. These cookies cannot track your browsing activity on other websites.

    We use these functionality cookies...

    COOKIE NAME DESCRIPTION
    PHPSESSID This cookie identifies your current session on our website. We use it to recognise individual choices you make on our website that are not stored in cookies and cannot be accessed outside of this website.

Links to other websites

This Cookie privacy notice does not cover the links within our website to other websites unless specially stated in this privacy notice. We encourage you to read the privacy statements on any other websites you visit.

Changes to this privacy notice

We keep our Cookie privacy notice under regular review. This Cookie privacy notice was last updated on 20th May 2017.