Cookie Law

Introduction to cookies

Most of the websites you visit use cookies to improve your experience; enabling a site to ‘remember’ you, either for the duration of your visit (using a ‘session cookie’) or for repeat visits (using a ‘persistent cookie’).

Cookies can be used for lots of different jobs, like letting you navigate between pages efficiently, storing your preferences, and improving your experience of a website. Cookies make the interaction between you and the website faster and easier. If a website doesn’t use cookies at all, it thinks you are a new visitor every time you navigate from one page to the next. Without cookies, it would be impossible to recall your login details for example.

Some websites will also use cookies to enable them to target their advertising or marketing messages based for example, on your location and/or browsing habits. It is this kind of tracking that has resulted in the change in the law. This site does not use cookies for that purpose.

Cookies may be set by the website you are visiting (‘first party cookies’) or they may be set by other websites who run content on the page you are viewing (‘third party cookies’).

What does a cookie contain?

A cookie is just a formatted text file that is stored on your computer by a website’s server. Only the server that stored it will be able to retrieve or read its contents. Each cookie is unique to your web browser. It contain some anonymous information such as a unique identifier and the site name along with some extra encoded data. By reading that previously stored information, the website can recall things like your preferences or what you placed into your shopping basket (for example).

Cookies used on this site

This site uses cookies to maintain a session. We need to maintain a session because this site has security, which requires you to log in, in order to see information that is pertinent to you. The new cookie law does not require us to ask permission before storing this kind of cookie on your machine, but we do need to tell you that this is something that we do. This is a very common use of cookies – virtually any site that requires a login, also requires this kind of cookie to differentiate between and identify the different people that are using the site at a given moment in time.

These cookies are essential to the site's operation and the law does not require us to seek permission for these - however we do need to inform you.

Cookies are not used for any other purpose. By using this site you give your consent for these cookies to be placed on your computer.