Cookies

When you visit our Website, we may attach a "Cookie" to your browser.The data we collect using Cookies does not identify individual users and is used for tracking and analysing use of the Website, website traffic information about a user's visit such as date, time and browser type.

What is a Cookie

Cookies are text files containing small amounts of information which are downloaded to your device when you visit a website. Cookies are then sent back to the originating website on each subsequent visit, or to another website that recognises that cookie. Cookies are useful because they allow a website to recognise a user’s device. You can find more information about cookies at: www.allaboutcookies.org and www.youronlinechoices.eu. For a video about cookies visit www.google.co.uk/goodtoknow/data-on-the-web/cookies.

Cookies do lots of different jobs, like letting you navigate between pages efficiently, remembering your preferences, and generally improve the user experience. They can also help to ensure that adverts you see online are more relevant to you and your interests.

Strictly Necessary Cookies

• These cookies are essential in order to enable you to move around the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the website or making pages load properly.
• Without these cookies services you have asked for cannot be provided.
• Other websites use strictly necessary cookies to do things like, provide users with services such as shopping baskets or e-billing.

User consent is not required for the delivery of those cookies which are strictly necessary to provide services requested by the user.

Technical notes on Strictly Necessary Cookies

Generally these cookies will be essential first-party session cookies, and if persistent or third party, there should be a good justification for this. Not all first-party session cookies will fall into the ‘strictly necessary’ category for the purposes of the legislation. Strictly necessary cookies will generally be used to store a unique identifier to manage and identify the user as unique to other users currently viewing the website, in order to provide a consistent and accurate service to the user.

Examples include: • Remembering previous actions (e.g. entered text) when navigating back to a page in the same session. • Managing and passing security tokens to different services within a website to identify the visitor’s status (e.g. logged in or not) • To maintain tokens for the implementation of secure areas of the website • To route customers to specific versions/applications of a service, such as might be used during a technical migration

These cookies will not be used

• To gather information that could be used for marketing to the user.
• To remember customer preferences or user ID’s outside a single session (unless the user has requested this function).

Performance Cookies

• These cookies collect information about how visitors use a website, for instance which pages visitors go to most often, and if they get error messages from web pages.
• These cookies don’t collect information that identifies a visitor.
• All information these cookies collect is aggregated and therefore anonymous. It is only used to improve how a website works.

Web analytics that use cookies to gather data to enhance the performance of a website fall into this category. For example, they may be used for testing designs and ensuring a consistent look and feel is maintained for the user.

Technical notes on Performance Cookies

These cookies can be first or third party, session or persistent cookies. To fall within this category their usage should be limited to performance and website improvement.

Examples include:

• Web analytics — where the data collected is limited to the website operator’s use only, for managing the performance and design of the site. These cookies can be third-party cookies but the information must be for the exclusive use of the publisher of the website visited.
• Ad response rates — where the data is used exclusively for calculating response rates (click-through rates) to improve the effectiveness of advertising purchased on a site external to the destination website. If the same cookie is used to retarget adverts on a third-party site this would fall outside the performance category.
• Affiliate tracking — where the cookie is used to let affiliates know that a visitor to a site visited a partner site some time later and if that visit resulted in the use or purchase of a product or service, including details of the product and service purchased. Affiliate tracking cookies allow the affiliate to improve the effectiveness of their site. If the same cookie is used to retarget adverts this would fall outside the performance category • Error management — Measuring errors presented on a website, typically this will be to support service improvement or complaint management and will generally be closely linked with web analytics. • Testing designs — Testing variations of design, typically using A/B or multivariate testing, to ensure a consistent look and feel is maintained for the user of the site in the current and subsequent sessions.

Other websites

The website may contain links to other sites which are outside our control and are not covered by this policy. The operators of these sites may collect information from you that will be used by them in accordance with their policy, which may differ to ours.

We will not (and will not allow any third party) to track or collect any personally identifiable information of visitors to our site. We will not associate any data gathered from this site with any personally identifying information from any other source. We will not (and will not allow any third party) to associate your IP address with any other data held by any third party. We will not (and will not allow any third party) to link, or seek to link, an IP address with the identity of a computer user.

Most web browsers will accept Cookies, but if you would prefer we did not collect data by this method, you can disable this function within your browser settings. However, without Cookies, you may not be able to use the full functionality of our Website, including personalisation of the web content to reflect your personal usage.

If you want to delete any cookies that are already on your computer, please refer to the instructions for your file management software to locate the file or directory that stores cookies.. Information on deleting or controlling cookies is available at www.AboutCookies.org.

How we protect your information

We capture your personal information, such as names and addresses, over a secure link using recognised industry standard Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) technology which encrypts the data whilst passing it over the web. This will be indicated on most browsers by a lock in the status bar at the bottom of the screen.

Firewalls are used to block unauthorised traffic to the servers and the actual servers are locked in a secure location which can only be accessed by authorised personnel.