Cookie Policy

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: infoCookie

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: _ga

Category: 4 – Statistics

Purpose: Registers a unique ID that is used to generate statistical data on how the visitor uses the website.

Length of time: 2 years.

Cookie name: _gat

Category: 4 – Statistics

Purpose: Used by Google Analytics to throttle request rate.

Length of time: Session.

Cookie name: _gid

Category: 4 – Statistics

Purpose: Registers a unique ID that is used to generate statistical data on how the visitor uses the website.

Length of time: Session.

Cookie name: collect

Category: 4 – Statistics

Purpose: Used to send data to Google Analytics about the visitor’s device and behaviour. Tracks the visitor across devices and marketing channels.

Length of time: Session.

Cookie name: IDE (doubleclick.net)Category: 2 – Marketing

Purpose: Used by Google’s Doubleclick to register and report the website user’s actions after viewing or clicking on one of the advertiser’s adverts with the purpose of measuring the efficiency of the advert and to present targeted ads to the user.

Length of time: 2 years

Cookie name: test_cookie (doubleclick.net)

Category: 2 – Marketing

Purpose: Used to check if the user’s browser supports cookies.

Length of time: Session.

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.