About Cookies

The 'cookie law' was passed by the European Union last year, but the UK government allowed an extra year’s grace before treating it as law here. That period of grace ceased at the end of May 2012.

The new law affects millions of websites across the EU. To find out how it affects yours, read on.

What are Cookies?

A cookie is a small text file that a website can store on your computer to help keep track of a variety of things, for example if you want to stay logged into a website, or your preferences within a website.

Our cookies help us to:

• Make our website work as you’d expect
• Remember your settings during and between visits
• Improve the speed/security of the site
• Allow you to share pages with social networks like Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter
• Make it easier to improve our website
• We do not use cookies to:
• Collect any personally identifiable information (without your express permission)
• Collect any sensitive information (without your express permission)
• Pass data to advertising networks
• Pass personally identifiable data to third parties
• Pay sales commissions

Granting us permission to use cookies

If the settings on your browser are adjusted to accept cookies, we take this (and your continued use of our website) to mean that you are fine with this. Should you wish to remove or not use cookies from our site you can learn how to do this below, however doing so will likely mean that our site will not work as you would expect.

We use cookies to make our website work including:

• Google Analytics
• Session Cookies
• Twitter

There is no way to prevent these cookies being set other than to not use our site.

Essential Cookies

We use cookies in certain sections of our website so that it works correctly including:

• Remembering your search settings
• Allowing you to add comments to our site
• Social Website Cookies
• So you can easily ‘Like’ or share our content on the likes of Facebook and Twitter we have included sharing buttons on our site. The privacy implications on this will vary from social network to social network and will be dependent on the privacy settings you have chosen on these networks.

Anonymous Visitor Statistics Cookies

We use cookies to compile visitor statistics such as how many people have visited our website, what type of technology they are using (e.g. Mac or Windows which helps to identify when our site isn’t working as it should for particular technologies), how long they spend on the site, what page they look at etc. This helps us to continuously improve our website. These so called ‘Analytics’ programs also tell us on an anonymous basis, how people reached this site (e.g. from a search engine) and whether they have been here before, and help us to develop our services to you.

Turning Cookies Off

You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies. Doing so, however, will limit the functionality of our website (and a large proportion of the world’s websites) as cookies are a standard part of most modern websites.