Cookie Policy

Most websites you visit will use cookies in order to improve your user experience, by enabling that website to ‘remember’ you, either for the duration of your visit (using a ‘session cookie’) or for repeat visits (using a ‘persistent cookie’). Most cookies are harmless and are purely designed and installed to help your online experience.

Some people find the idea of a website storing information on their computer or mobile device a bit intrusive, particularly when this information is stored and used by a third party without them knowing. Although this is generally quite harmless, 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 functionality for those websites where you do this.

If you don’t want to receive cookies, you can modify your browser so that it notifies you when cookies are sent to it, or you can refuse cookies altogether. You can also delete cookies that have already been set.

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 to do this.

A cookie is a simple text file that is stored on your computer or mobile device by a website’s server. Only that server will be able to retrieve or read the contents of that cookie. Each cookie is also unique to each of your web browsers. The cookie will contain anonymous information, such as a unique identifier and the site name and some digits and numbers.

Cookies do lots of different jobs, like letting you navigate between pages efficiently, 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, and this can lead to slower page load times.

Cookies may be set by the website you are visiting (‘first party cookies’) or they may be set by other websites who run content on the page you are viewing (‘third party cookies’).

First party cookies are set by the website you are visiting, and they can only be read by that site. Third party cookies are set by a different organisation to the owner of the website you are visiting. For example, like many other website owners, we use various commercial web analytics tools, which allow us to gather general information about users who interact with our website.

The website you are visiting may also contain content embedded from external social media websites and these sites may also set their own cookies. We plan to introduce various social media onto our website – such as, for example; YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google + and Twitter. Their respective use of cookies will not affect you unless you click on their respective icons/links.

The website you are visiting may also have links to other third party websites. We may introduce links on our page to other websites. Please note that our cookies policy only relates to the cookies that are found on our website, and that the management of other websites is outside of our control. However, we will make reasonable attempts to ensure that we are not directing you to visit websites that might use cookies in a disreputable fashion. It is your responsibility to read the cookies policy for every website you visit if you wish to understand how each intends to use them.

Some websites also use cookies to enable them to target advertising or marketing messages based, for example, on your location and/or browsing habits. We do not use these types of cookies on our website. Session cookies are stored only temporarily during a browsing session and are deleted from the user’s device when the browser is closed. Persistent cookies are saved on your computer for a fixed period (usually a year or longer) and are not deleted when the browser is closed. Persistent cookies are used where we need to know who you are for more than one browsing session.

The Information Commissioner’s Office is the UK’s independent authority set up to uphold information rights in the public interest, promoting openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals. If you are interested in finding out more about guidance and best practice with regards to the use of cookies on websites, please visit their website at www.ico.org.uk

Alternatively, you may wish to visit www.aboutcookies.org.uk which contains comprehensive information on how to manage cookies for a wide variety of desktop browsers.

We also recommend that our website users visit the BBC cookies web page. You will find a lot of useful information at www.bbc.co.uk/privacy/cookies

We welcome feedback from our users: please contact [email protected] with any helpful comments and criticisms. We will use this information to help us to improve the way we use cookies on our website for the benefit of all users.