Our website uses cookies to distinguish you from other users of our website. This helps us to provide you with a good experience when you browse our website and also allows us to improve our site. By continuing to browse the site, you are agreeing to our use of cookies.
A cookie is a small file of letters and numbers that we store on your browser or the hard drive of your computer if you agree.
Cookies contain information that is transferred to your computer’s hard drive.
We use the following cookies:
Functionality cookies. Collect data manually added like web forms.
Analytical/performance cookies. They allow us to recognise and count the number of visitors and to see how visitors move around our website when they are using it. This helps us to improve the way our website works, for example, by ensuring that users are finding what they are looking for easily.
You can find more information about the individual cookies we use and the purposes for which we use them below:
1) Information Requests (Functionality cookies.)
We use contact information from web forms and emails to send you information or materials that you have requested. Your contact information is also used to contact you when necessary, for example, to fulfil a query.
2) Google Analytics (Analytical/performance cookies)
We like to keep track of what pages and links are popular and which ones don’t get used so much to help us keep our sites relevant and up to date. It’s also very useful to be able to identify trends of how people navigate (find their way through) our sites and if they get ‘error messages’ from web pages.
This group of cookies, often called ‘analytics cookies’ are used to gather this information. These cookies don’t collect information that identifies you. The information collected is anonymous and is grouped with the information from everyone else’s cookies. We can then see the overall patterns of usage rather than any one person’s activity. Analytics cookies only record activity on the site you are on and they are only used to improve how a website works.
Some of our websites and some of the emails you might get from us also contain small invisible images known as ‘web beacons’ or ‘tracking pixels’. These are used to count the number of times the page or email has been viewed and allows us to measure the effectiveness of its marketing and emails. These web beacons are anonymous and don’t contain or collect any information that identifies you.
We also use ‘affiliate’ cookies. Some of our web pages will contain promotional links to other companies’ sites. If you follow one of these links and then register with or buy something from that other site, a cookie is sometimes used to tell that other site that you came from one of our sites. That other site may then pay us a small amount for the successful referral. This works using a cookie.
Manage your analytics cookies
Virtually all modern browsers allow you to see what cookies you’ve got, and to delete them individually or delete all of them.
Many browsers can also be set up to ask consent for each individual cookie before it is set. This gives you very fine control over what cookies you get, but it can slow down your browsing experience if you have to check each and every cookie.
Most browsers also give you the right to block third party cookies. Most of these third party cookies will be the behavioural advertising cookies. Therefore blocking 3rd party cookies is effectively opting out of most behavioural advertising.
Some browsers let you block cookies from particular sites. So for example if you are happy to get cookies from a site you trust, but you don’t want to get cookies from a site you don’t particularly trust, you can set up your browser to black list the site you don’t trust and refuse any cookies it tries to give you.
Most browsers will let you delete all cookies when you close your browser. You should be aware that any preferences including any opt outs you have set will be lost if you do this.
Finally, you can tell your browser to block all cookies from being set. You should be aware that if you do choose this option many sites will not work as smoothly as you are used to, and some functionality that is reliant on cookies to enable services you want to use will not work at all.
The links below take you to the help sections for each of the major browsers, that will tell you how you can manage your cookies:
Please note that third parties (including, for example, advertising networks and providers of external services like web traffic analysis services) may also use cookies, over which we have no control. These cookies are likely to be analytical/performance cookies or targeting cookies.
