ABOUT COOKIES
What is a Cookie?
Cookies are small, harmless files placed on your computer's hard drive or in your browser memory when you visit a website. Here you can find out more about how we use them.
What do Cookies do?
Cookies help to make the interaction between users and websites faster and easier. For example, when you make an enquiry online, cookies help our site remember the information you give us as you move through your application.
Some of the cookies we use help us understand how our customers use our website, for example the pages they visit and the links they click on, while others enable us to learn which advertisements bring customers to our website.
What our cookies don't do is store any personal or confidential information about you.
Are cookies safe?
Yes, cookies are harmless text files. They can't look into your computer or read any personal information or other material on your hard drive. Cookies can't carry viruses or install anything harmful on your computer.
Why should I keep cookies switched on?
We advise you to keep cookies active during your visits to our website because parts of the site rely on them to work properly. For example, you may not be able to access your account if your cookies are disabled.
Types of Cookies we use
Like most large websites, we use session cookies and persistent cookies.
We use session cookies, which last only for the duration of your visit and are deleted when you close your browser. No personally- identifiable data is collected. These simply enable us to identify that the same person is moving from page to page.
While you are using our website a unique ID will track your session from page to page to keep you signed in whilst you service your accounts online or to keep your session open whilst you complete forms. Without session cookies these functions would not work.
We also use certain cookies that are persistent, meaning that they last beyond your session. Persistent cookies don't use any personally identifiable information, but they do help our website remember you as a user each time you use the same computer to revisit us. Persistent cookies last for a pre-defined period unless they are deleted.
Some of our cookies are applied by our advertising partners to help manage our online advertising. Similarly, we also use analytics to allow us to track how popular our site is and to record visitor trends over time.
There is no reason for visitors to our website to be concerned about the privacy implications of any of the cookies we use, but we recognise the importance of transparency as to the purpose & scope of the data stored in the cookies which are created or updated on your computer when you visit the website. As well as changing your privacy settings, you may choose to delete these cookies from your computer between visits to our website. You may also disable cookies in your web browser settings and this will not prevent you from accessing our website. However, certain parts of our website may not operate correctly without cookies enabled.
We recommend that if you have concerns about the privacy implications of the cookies we use, then you should investigate how to do this using the cookie management tools in your web browser
Full details of the cookies which Google Analytics uses can be found in Cookies & Google Analytics in documentation for Google's Analytics tracking code. You can also read Google's Privacy Policy for Google Analytics. If you wish to opt out of our use of Google Analytics you may wish to consider using the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on in order to maintain your experience for the rest of the website.
Content Management & site navigation: Our content management tool creates a number of first-party cookies:
These are session cookies which are deleted when you close your browser. The cookie helps our website to function correctly. This data is aggregated and not personally identifiable.
In all cases these first-party cookies do not store any personal or sensitive information, or anything that makes you personally identifiable to us.