Privacy and cookies
What are Cookies?
A cookie is a very small piece of information that a website stores to save and collect basic information. Many cookies are essential to the operation of our website, for example to allow you apply for an online account with us. Cookies on our site are also used to customise certain areas of content just for you, and to make your browsing experience more efficient and faster.
How we use Cookies
We use cookies to understand how people use our websites and to help us to make your experience of our website better. Some of them are essential for our websites to work properly and some allow us to understand more about how users use the website so we can improve it. We use cookies to enable the following:
Using features on our websites
We use a session cookie called SESSION_COOKIE. We do not store private data in it and the cookie is automatically removed when the users session ends.
Cookie name: SESSION_COOKIE
Category: 1 – Strictly necessary cookie
Purpose: To retain settings about the current visit to one of websites. Language selection etc.
Cookie name: Cookieinfo
Category: 1 – Strictly necessary cookie
Purpose: To advise you that the website uses cookies and store your preference not to see this message again.
For measuring web traffic
We use a program called Google Analytics, which in turn uses cookies to help us find out how many people visit our website, which pages and parts are most popular, how long people spend in each area and what information people are searching for. All this insight helps us to understand how we can improve our websites.
Cookie name: _utma
Category: 2 – Performance cookie
Purpose: Saves information about total number of visits to the site, the time of the first visit, previous visit and current visit. This is a persistent cookie with a lifespan of two years.
Cookie name: _utmb
Category: 2 – Performance cookie
Purpose: Used to record information about what happened during the current visit or session, including the ability to tell when a session ends.
Cookie name: _utmc
Category: 1 – Strictly necessary cookie, 2 – Performance cookie
Purpose: Session cookie that expires at the end of the current session/visit.
Cookie name: _utmz
Category: 2 – Performance cookie
Purpose: Saves info relating to how a user arrived at a site, the channel though which they came, date/time info and what keywords they used if they arrived via a search engine.
For Social sharing and referrals
We used Share This to enable our users to bookmark or refer to content on our website using social channels. The following are the cookies listed by name, how long they last for and a link to the privacy policy on an external site to find out more.
Share This
Cookie name: Unam
9 months
Cookie name: _stid
1 year
Cookie name: _uset
Half an hour
Cookie name: UID
2 years
Cookie name: UIDR
2 years
For more information on Share This cookies visit http://sharethis.com/privacy
How can I manage my cookies and where can I find more information?
If you don’t want us to use cookies in your web browser, you can remove them from your computer or change your browser settings so that it either blocks cookies altogether or asks you if you’d like to accept them from some websites. As we mentioned earlier, some of our cookies are essential for our websites to work properly.
The internet industry body, the Internet Advertising Bureau has set up a website to provide information and advice on cookies http://www.youronlinechoices.com/uk/ and another source which gives information about how to delete and control cookies is http://www.aboutcookies.org/.
If we change our cookie policy it will be updated on this page.