Important – by using our websites, we assume you consent to the use of cookies.
Providing our services on our website sometimes means that we need to place small amounts of information on your device. This information is stored in small text files that are known as cookies. Most websites do this to improve how they work and respond to you, for example:
- Remembering settings, so you don’t have to keep re-entering them on each new page
- Remembering information you’ve given so you don’t need to keep entering it
- Measuring how you use the website so we can make sure it meets your needs
Our cookies aren’t used to identify you personally. They’re just here to make the site work better for you. Indeed, you can manage and/or delete these small files as you wish.
To learn more about cookies and how to manage them, visit the About Cookies website.
Google Analytics cookies
We use cookies to monitor how you use our website so that we can make sure it’s meeting your needs and to give us an understanding of what we can improve to make it better. We do this using a tool called Google Analytics which gathers information about which pages you visit, how long you visit them for, how you got to them (e.g. via a search or through our navigation menus) and what you click on when you are on them.
- Name: _utma
- Purpose: This randomly generated number is used to determine unique visitors to our site
- Expires: 2 years
- Name:_utmb
- Purpose: This randomly generated number works with _utmc to calculate the average length of time users spend on our site
- Expires: 30 minutes
- Name: _utmc
- Purpose: This randomly generated number works with _utmb to calculate when you close your browser
- Expires: When you close your web browser
- Name: _utmz
- Purpose: This is a randomly generated number and information about how the site was reached (e.g. direct or via a link, organic search or paid search)
- Expires: 6 months
We do not collect or store your personal information (e.g. your name or address) so this information cannot be used to identify who you are. We also don’t allow Google to use or share our analytics data.
To opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics across all websites (not just ours) visit http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.
Strictly necessary cookies
We also use cookies to be able to provide some of the more complex functionality on our websites. That is to say where we are not simply providing a web page of information for you to read but rather something more interactive, for example an electronic form. The cookies we use in these instances are essential for those elements to work. Again, they don’t contain any personal information and can’t be used to identify who you are.