To make our sites work properly, we sometimes place small data files called cookies on your device. Most interactive websites do this too.

What are cookies?

Cookies are small files that are saved to your computer or device when you visit a website to track information about your interactions and usage of that site. This allows the website to provide the users with a tailored experience within the site. It also enables the site to remember your actions and preferences (such as login, language, font size and other display preferences) over a period of time, so you don’t have to keep re-entering them whenever you come back to the site or browse from one page to another. Our websites also use tracking software to help us to better understand our visitors and how they use our websites. This software is provided by Google Analytics which uses cookies to track visitor usage. The software will save a cookie to your computer’s hard drive in order to track and monitor your engagement and usage of the website, but will not store, save or collect personal information. You can read Google’s privacy policy here for further information http://www.google.com/privacy.html. Other cookies may be stored to your computer’s hard drive by external vendors when the site you’re on uses referral programs, sponsored links or adverts. Such cookies are used for conversion and referral tracking and typically expire after 30 days, though some may take longer. No personal information is stored, saved or collected.

How do we use cookies?

We use cookies for many purposes. We use them, for example, to remember your preferences, to make the ads you see more relevant to you, to count how many visitors we receive to a page, to help you sign up for our services and to protect your data. We use different types of cookies to run our services. Some or all of the cookies identified below may be stored in your browser.

Category of use	Example
Preferences	These cookies allow our websites to remember information that changes the way the site behaves or looks, such as your preferred language or the region you are in. These cookies can also assist you in changing text size, font and other parts of web pages that you can personalize. Loss of the information stored in a preference cookie may make the website experience less smooth but should not prevent it from working.
Processes	Process cookies help make the website work and deliver services that the  visitor expects, like navigating around web pages and implementing advanced functionality. Without these cookies, the website often cannot function properly.
Advertising	We use cookies to make advertising more engaging to users and more valuable to publishers and advertisers. Some common applications of cookies are to select advertising based on what’s relevant to a user; to improve reporting on campaign performance; and to avoid showing ads the user has already seen. We also use conversion cookies, whose main purpose is to help advertisers determine how many times people who click on their ads end up purchasing their products. These cookies allow the advertiser to determine that you clicked the ad and later visited the advertiser’s site. Conversion cookies persist for a limited time only.
Session State	Many of our websites which have interactive elements make use of session cookies in order to tailor the user’s experience. For example when you add something to a shopping basket a session state cookie allows us to link your browser with that shopping basket while you browse around the site, or when you log in to a site a session cookie enables us to remember that you are logged in so we don’t have to ask every time you want to carry out an action. Session cookies persist for as long as you are browsing a site and are deleted either when they reach a certain age or you close your browser. Blocking or deleting session cookies will often negatively impact a website’s functionality.
Analytics	We use analytics cookies to help us understand how you engage with our services. These cookies collect information and report website usage statistics, include the pages users visit most often, without personally identifying individual visitors. Blocking or deleting these cookies will not render the website unusable.

How to control cookies

You can control and/or delete cookies as you wish – for details, see aboutcookies.org or cookiepedia.co.uk/all-about-cookies.  You can delete all cookies that are already on your computer and you can set most browsers to control which, how and when cookies are placed. If you do this, however, you may have to manually adjust some preferences every time you visit a site and some services and functionalities may not work.