cookies

Cookies In Use On This Site

What are cookies?

Our website uses cookies, as almost all websites do, to help provide you with the best experience we can. Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer or mobile phone when you browse websites.

Some cookies only last until you close your browser or for a short time. These are called 'session cookies'. Some cookies stay on your computer even though you have closed your browser, these are called 'persistent cookies'.

Cookies set by us are called 'first party cookies'. Our website also uses cookies provided by other parties. These cookies are called 'third party cookies'.

You can learn more about all the cookies we use below in the "what cookies do we use" section.

Granting us permission to use cookies

You will have seen a box flash up on the bottom right hand side of our website alerting you to the fact that we use cookies with a link to this cookie policy. If you do not want the cookies to be set on our website see the section below called "Turning cookies off" for how to turn them off. Otherwise we will take your use of our website as your consent to the cookies we use.

What cookies do we use?

We use the following cookies for the reasons set out below.

What is the name of the cookie? Is the cookie a session or persistent cookie? If the cookie is a persistent cookie
how long does it
last for?		 What happens if the cookie
isn't set?		 What is the cookie used for? What does it do?
_utma Persistent 2 years Your experience won't be interrupted but we won't receive the tracking  information. This is a third party cookie set by Google Analytics.  It is used in tracking the number of times a person visits our website.    It is set when you first visit our website.
_utmb Session n/a Your experience won't be interrupted but we won't receive the tracking information. This is a third party cookie set by Google Analytics.  It is used to give a time stamp of when a person first enters our website.  It is set when you first visit our website.
_utmc Session n/a Your experience won't be interrupted but we won't receive the tracking information. This is a third party cookie set by Google Analytics.  It is used to give a time stamp of when a person leaves our website.  It is set when you first visit our website.
_utmz Persistent 6 Months Your experience won't be interrupted but we won't receive the tracking information. This is a third party cookie set by Google Analytics.  It is used to tell us where the visitor came from (google search, direct, link etc.) and where in the world they are.  It is set when you first visit our website.

 

Turning Cookies Off

You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies. We've set out below links to some instructions on how to do this but please note we are not responsible for other people's websites. If you do turn off the cookies you will lose the functionality as set out in the table above.

In order to understand these setttings, the following links may be helpful, otherwise you should use the 'Help' option in your browser for more details.

Cookie settings in Internet Explorer
Cookie settings in Firefox
Cookie settings in Chrome
Cookie settings in Safari web and iOS.

It may be that your concerns around cookies relate to so called "spyware" not cookies. Rather than switching off cookies in your browser you may find that anti-spyware software achieves the same objective by automatically deleting cookies considered to be invasive. Learn more about managing cookies with antispyware software but please note we are not responsible for other people's websites.

Useful links

If you would like to find out more about cookies and their use on the Internet, you may find the following links useful but please note we are not responsible for other people's websites:

Microsoft Cookies guide
All About Cookies

For further legal information about privacy issues, you may find these links useful but please note we are not responsible for other people's websites:

Data Protection Act 1998
The Information Commissioner's Office

Updates to this policy

From time to time we may change the cookies which are used on our website, so we will need to update this policy. Therefore, we recommend you review this policy regularly.