What are Cookies used for?

Most websites use cookies in order to improve the user experience by enabling that website to ‘remember’ information about your browsing experience, either for the duration of the visit or for repeat visits.

Cookies do a range of different jobs, like letting you navigate between pages efficiently, storing your preferences, and generally improving your experience of a website. Cookies make the interaction between you and the website faster and easier. If a website doesn’t use cookies, it will think you are a new visitor every time you move to a new page on the site – for example, when you enter your login details and move to another page it won’t recognise you and it won’t be able to keep you logged in.

Some websites will also use cookies to enable them to target their advertising or marketing messages based for example, on your location and/or browsing habits.

What is a Cookie?

A cookie is a simple text file that is stored on your computer or mobile device by a website’s server and only that server will be able to retrieve or read the contents of that cookie. Each cookie is unique to your web browser. It will contain some anonymous information such as a unique identifier and the site name and some digits and numbers. It allows a website to remember things like your preferences, what’s in your shopping basket and analyse how well the website is performing.

Most cookies won’t collect information that identifies you, and will instead collect more general information such as how users arrive at and use our websites, or a user’s general location.

What sort of cookies does do we use?

Session/Performance cookies

Session Cookies are stored only temporarily during a browsing session and are deleted from the user’s device when the browser is closed.

We utilise some cookies to analyse how our visitors use our website and to monitor website performance. This allows us to provide a high-quality experience by customising our offering and quickly identifying and fixing any issues that arise. For example, we might use performance cookies to keep track of which pages are most popular, which method of linking between pages is most effective, and to determine why some pages are receiving error messages. We might also use these cookies to highlight articles or site services that we think will be of interest to you based on your usage of the website.

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Functionality Cookies

We use functionality cookies to allow us to remember your preferences. For example, cookies save you the trouble of typing in your username every time you access the site.

We also use functionality cookies to provide you with enhanced services such as allowing you to watch a video online or comment on a blog.

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3rd Party Cookies

We allow Google to serve cookies that fall into one of the categories above. For example, like many companies, we use Google Analytics to help us monitor our website traffic. We may also use third-party cookies to help us with market research, revenue tracking, improving site functionality, and monitoring compliance with our terms and conditions and copyright policy.

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What to do if you don’t want cookies to be set

As we’ve explained above, cookies help you to get the most out of our websites.

The first time you accessed our website after 1st July 2012, you should have seen a pop-up box which explained that by continuing to access our site, you are consenting to our use of cookies.

If you prefer, it is possible to block some or all cookies, or even to delete cookies that have already been set; but you need to be aware that you might lose some function of the website.

If you wish to restrict or block web browser cookies which are set on your device then you can do this through your browser settings; the Help function within your browser should tell you how.

Alternatively, you may wish to visit www.aboutcookies.org, which contains comprehensive information on how to do this on a wide variety of desktop browsers.