What are cookies?

A cookie is a piece of data sent to your device from a website. This means the website can recognize your device if you return to the same website. Cookies do not contain any personal information about you and cannot be used to identify an individual user. A cookie often includes a unique identifier, which is an anonymous number (randomly generated) and is stored on your device. Some expire at the end of your website session; others remain on your computer for longer.

These pieces of information are used to improve services for you through, for example:

• recognizing that you may already have given a username and password so you don’t need to do it for every web page requested (please note, the session cookies used are to track your current session (e.g. determining authentication status) - the username and password are not stored in a cookie)
• measuring how many people are using services, so they can be made easier to use and there’s enough capacity to ensure that they are fast
• analyzing anonymized data to help us understand how people interact with our services so that we can make them better

How to Manage Cookies

• You can manage these small files and learn more about them from the article Internet Browser cookies- what they are and how to manage them.
• Learn how to remove cookies set on your device

Cookies used on this Website

There are two types of cookie you may encounter when using our website:

First party cookies: these are our own cookies, controlled by us and used to provide information about usage of our site.

Third party cookies: these are cookies found in other companies’ internet tools which we are using to enhance our site, for example Facebook or Twitter have their own cookies, which are controlled by them.

How to Control and Delete Cookies

We will not use cookies to collect personally identifiable information about you.

However, if you wish to restrict or block the cookies which are set by our websites, or indeed any other website, you can do this through your browser settings. The ‘Help’ function within your browser should tell you how.

Alternatively, you may wish to visit aboutcookies.org which contains comprehensive information on how to do this on a wide variety of browsers. You will also find details on how to delete cookies from your machine as well as more general information about cookies.

Please be aware that restricting cookies may impact on the functionality of our website.

If you wish to view a cookie's code, just open your cookie file in your browser and click on a cookie to open it. You'll see a short string of text and numbers. The numbers are your identification card, which can only be seen by the server that gave you the cookie.

For information on how to do this on the browser of your mobile phone you will need to refer to your handset manual.

To opt-out of third-parties collecting any data about your interaction on our website, please refer to their websites for further information.