What are cookies?
When we provide services, we want to make them easy, useful and reliable. Where services are delivered on the internet, this sometimes involves placing small amounts of information on your device, for example, computer or mobile phone. These include small files known as cookies. They cannot be used to identify you personally.
These pieces of information are used to improve services for you through, for example:
- Enabling a service to recognise your device so you don’t have to give the same information several times during one task
- Recognising that you may already have given a username and password so you don’t need to do it for every web page requested
- Measuring how many people are using services, so they can be made easier to use and there’s enough capacity to ensure they are fast.
- Enables a service that shows you relevant advertisements based upon the resources you have viewed on the website.
You can manage these small files yourself through your browser settings.
Which cookies?
We use the following cookies on our website
Cookie: Session cookie
Name: __qca
Purpose: Set by the content management system that runs this website whenever a visitor accesses the site. This specifies that the visitor is a guest user. This cookie is essential to the function of a visit to the website, but is not used to identify individual visitors.
Cookie: Resolution cookie
Name: resolution
Purpose: Set by the content management system that runs this website whenever a visitor accesses the site. This cookie adjusts the page to fit the browser size. This cookie is essential to the function of a visit to the website, but is not used to identify individual visitors.
Cookie: Google Analytics
Name: __utma
Purpose: Set by Google Analytics on your first visit to this website. This cookie is used to determine unique visitors to this site and it is updated with each page view. This is used to help us measure numbers and volumes of visitors using anonymised data.
Cookie: Google Analytics
Name: __utmb
Purpose: Set by Google Analytics to establish and continue your visits to our site. Each time a user visits a different page on our site, this cookie is updated to expire in 30 minutes, thus continuing a single session for as long as your activity continues within 30-minute intervals. This cookie expires when a visitor pauses on a page on our site for longer than 30 minutes. This is used to help us measure numbers and volumes of visitors using anonymised data.
Cookie: Google Analytics
Name:__utmz,
Purpose: Set by Google Analytics to store how a visitor reaches our website; whether via a direct method, a referring link, a website search, or a campaign such as an ad or an email link. This cookie is updated with each page view on our website. This is used to help us measure the success of online marketing (e.g. organic or paid search engine listings) and offline marketing that is used to direct visitors to this website. This uses anonymised data.