What are cookies?
Cookies are small files of letters and numbers. These files are either stored in the memory of your computer or other device such as mobile phones or tablet devices (these cookies are generally known as session cookies) or are placed on the hard drive of your device (generally known as persistent cookies).
For more details about cookies and details of how to delete and disable cookies you can visit www.aboutcookies.org and also see our section on more information and turning cookies off below.
For more info check out the ICC UK Cookie Guide.
Cookies for performance
We use Google Analytics, which creates a number of first-party cookies:
Name: __utma
Purpose: Google Analytics: This cookie helps us determine the number of unique visitors to our website.
Name: __utma
Purpose: Google Analytics: This cookie helps us determine the referral method for people visiting our website. This helps us to analyse the traffic arriving at our website and to determine which are the most popular routes (e.g. direct, search engine)
Name: __utmc
Purpose: Google Analytics: We use this Google Analytics cookie to help us to record the length of individual sessions from our users on our website. Each time you move to a new page within our website within 30 minutes of arriving the cookie updates so that we know that you are still actively using our website within a single session.
Name: __utmz
Purpose: Google Analytics: Similar to _utmb, we use this Google Analytics cookie to help us record the length of individual sessions on our website.
Full details of the cookies which Google Analytics uses can be found in Cookies & Google Analytics in documentation for Google's Analytics tracking code. You can also read Google's Privacy Policy for Google Analytics.
We don't share the data that Google Analytics collects, and we don't believe that our use of Google Analytics intrudes on your privacy. We use the data that is collected in the following ways:
to report, in aggregate, how our visitors find and use our website;
to understand overall visitor behaviour; and
to inform how we update and improve our website.
To opt out of our use of Google Analytics you may wish to consider using the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on.