Cookie Policy
What is a cookie?
Cookies are text files containing small amounts of information which are downloaded to your device when you visit a website. Cookies are then sent back to the originating website on each subsequent visit, or to another website that recognizes that cookie. Cookies are useful because they allow a website to recognize a user’s device. Cookies do lots of different jobs, like letting you navigate between pages efficiently, remembering your preferences, and generally improve the user experience. They can also help to ensure that adverts you see online are more relevant to you and your interests. The cookies used on our websites have been categorized as follows based on the categories found in the ICC UK Cookie guide:
Category 1: strictly necessary cookies These cookies are essential in order to enable you to move around the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the website. Without these cookies services you have asked for, like downloading content, cannot be provided.
Category 2: performance cookies These cookies collect information about how visitors use a website, for instance which pages visitors go to most often, and if they get error messages from web pages. These cookies don’t collect information that identifies a visitor. All information these cookies collect is aggregated and therefore anonymous. It is only used to improve how a website works. A list of the cookies used by our websites is provided below:
| Cookies | Name | Cookie Purpose/Description | Cookie Category |
|---|---|---|---|
| PHPSESSID | This cookie is used for managing a user’s session on the website. Cookie generated by applications based on the PHP language. This is a general purpose identifier used to maintain user session variables. It is normally a randomly generated number, how it is used can be specific to the site, but a good example is maintaining a logged-in status for a user between pages. | Strictly Necessary | |
| Google analytics | _ga | This cookie is used to distinguish unique users by assigning a randomly generated number as a client identifier. It is included in each page request on a site and used to calculate visitor, session and campaign data for the sites analytics reports. By default, it is set to expire after 2 years, although this is customisable by website owners. | Performance |
| _gat | This cookie is used to throttle the request rate – limiting the collection of data on high traffic sites. It expires after 10 minutes. | Performance | |
| _gid | This cookie stores and updates a unique value for each page visited. | Performance |