Our site uses the following types of cookies:

Strictly Necessary Cookies

We deploy cookies to help us to identify how users navigate to and around our website and to enable some of the features within the site that may be beneficial to you (for example, language preferences, or print page features). This helps us deliver an effective online service to you. These are known as “First Party” cookies.

The strictly necessary cookies are listed below:

In some situations, and on some pages of our websites, we may need to use a CSRF cookie/token (Cross Site Request Forgery). This is to help protect any form submissions of data to our web applications. The name of this cookie may vary but we will endeavour to name this cookie with a descriptive name such as “csrf_token_536egtd” or something similar. For more information on CSRF and the usage of cookies/tokens please see the following link and the relevant links on that page: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/CSRF

Functionality Cookies

These cookies allow our sites to remember choices you make (such as user name, or region you are in) and provide enhanced, more personal features. These cookies can also be used to remember changes you have made to text size, fonts and other parts of web page which you can customise. The information these cookies collect may be anonymised and they cannot track your browsing activity on other websites.

The functionality cookies are listed below:

• Language – This cookie is used to store language preferences, to serve up content in the stored language.

Performance Cookies

We may also use cookies issued by third parties (“Third Party” cookies) to track the websites you visited or search terms you used immediately prior to visiting this site, or to collect information about how visitors use the site. We use Google Analytics for this purpose. Google Analytics uses its own cookies. These cookies don’t collect information that identify a visitor. All information these cookies collect is aggregated and therefore anonymous. It is only used to improve how the site works. You can find out more about Google Analytics cookies here: https://developers.google.com/analytics/resources/concepts/gaConceptsCookies.

You can avoid the use of Google Analytics relating to your use of our site by downloading and installing the Browser Plugin available via this link:
http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout?hl=en-GB .

The performance cookies are listed below:

• _gid – This cookie name is associated with Google Universal Analytics. This cookie stores and updates a unique value for each page visited.
• _pk_id* – This cookie name is associated with the Piwik open source web analytics platform. It is used to help website owners track visitor behaviour and measure site performance. It is a pattern type cookie, where the prefix _pk_id is followed by a short series of numbers and letters, which is believed to be a reference code for the domain setting the cookie.
• _gat – This cookie name is associated with Google Universal Analytics, according to documentation it is used to throttle the request rate – limiting the collection of data on high traffic sites. It expires after 10 minutes.
• _pk_ses* – This cookie name is associated with the Piwik open source web analytics platform. It is used to help website owners track visitor behaviour and measure site performance. It is a pattern type cookie, where the prefix _pk_ses is followed by a short series of numbers and letters, which is believed to be a reference code for the domain setting the cookie.
• _ga – This cookie name is associated with Google Universal Analytics – which is a significant update to Google’s more commonly used analytics service. This cookie is used to distinguish unique users by assigning a randomly generated number as a client identifier. It is included in each page request in a site and used to calculate visitor, session and campaign data for the sites analytics reports. By default it is set to expire after 2 years, although this is customisable by website owners.
• JSESSIONID – This domain is third party performance cookie. It is controlled by New Relic, which provides a platform for monitoring the performance of web and mobile applications.

Social Media Cookies

These cookies are used when you share information using a social media sharing button or “like” button on our site or you link your account or engage with our content on or through a social networking site such as Facebook, Twitter or Google+. The social network will record that you have done this. This information may be linked to targeting/advertising activities.

The social media cookies are listed below:

• Google DoubleClick – We use these cookies to measure the effectiveness of our online marketing campaigns; to improve reporting on campaign performance; and to avoid showing ads the user has already seen.
• Google Analytics – These cookies are used to collect information about how visitors use our website. We use the information to help us improve the website. The cookies collect information in an anonymous form, including the number of visitors to the website, where visitors have come to the website from and the pages they visited.
• Twitter – Twitter uses cookies and other similar technologies, such as pixels or local storage, to help provide you with a better, faster, and safer experience. Like many websites, Twitter uses cookies to discover how people are using their services and to make them work better.
• YouTube – YouTube is a Google owned platform for hosting and sharing videos. YouTube collects user data through videos embedded in websites, which is aggregated with profile data from other Google services in order to display targeted advertising to web visitors across a broad range of their own and other websites. the HSID cookies is used by Google in combination with SID to verify Google user account and most recent login time.