What are cookies?

A cookie is a small text file which includes a unique identifier that is sent by a web server to the browser on your computer, mobile phone or any other internet enabled device when you visit an on-line site. Cookies and similar technologies are widely used to make websites work efficiently and to collect information about your online preferences. For simplicity, we refer to all these technologies as “cookies”.

Some of our website pages may contain electronic images known as web beacons (also known as clear gifs, tags or pixels) that allow us to count users who have visited our pages. Web beacons collect only limited information, e.g. a cookie number, time and date of a page view, and a description of the page on which the web beacon resides. We may also carry web beacons placed by third party advertisers. These beacons do not carry any information that could directly identify you.

How do we use cookies?

We use cookies and other tracking technologies to customise content and advertising, provide social media features and to see how our visitors move through our website. We use this information to develop our products and services, and to make decisions about ways to improve the services we offer to our website users and customers.

We may engage third party tracking and advertising providers such as those named below to act on our behalf to track and analyse your usage of our website through the use of cookies. These third parties collect, and share with us, usage information about visits to our website and, sometimes by correlating this information with other information (e.g. your IP address), measure and research the effectiveness of our advertisements, track page usage, help us target our recommendations and advertising, and track use of our recommendations and advertisements.

• Strictly Necessary cookies – These cookies are essential for parts of our website to operate. They enable users to move around our website and allow us to recognise a user within our website so that we can provide them with service they asked for such as remembering the user’s sign-in details.
• Performance cookies – These cookies collect information on how users use our websites, in order to help us improve areas such as navigation, and to help us fix technical issues or errors. For example, we use these cookies to help us understand how you arrive at our website, browse or use our website and highlight areas where we can improve our website.
• Functionality cookies – These cookies help us customise our website content based on a user’s preferences. They remember the user’s choices, their language, the country pages visited and any changes the user makes to text size or other parts of our website pages. The information these cookies collect may be anonymised and they cannot track browsing activity on other websites.
• Targeting / Advertising cookies – We may use other cookies to target and re-target visitors to our websites with digital advertising that is most relevant to the user. These cookies are also used to limit the number of times you see an advert or particular content, as well as help measure the effectiveness of an advertising or marketing campaign. Using existing cookies from many sites already on your computer, we partner with 3rd party companies to deliver advertising to specific computers.

How do I reject cookies?

If you do not want to be tracked by Google Analytics cookies you can opt-out by installing a browser plug-in here: https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout/

At any time, you can prevent cookies from being set on your browser. For instructions on how to block, delete or disable any cookies, please consult your browser’s ‘Help’ or ‘Support’ section. Please note that by deleting our cookies or disabling future cookies you may not be able to access certain areas or features of our website.

Please consult the following links for information on cookie management and blocking according to your browser:

• Explorer: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/internet-explorer/delete-manage-cookies#ie=ie-11
• Firefox: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-and-disable-cookies-website-preferences
• Chrome: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95647?hl=en
• Safari: https://support.apple.com/kb/PH19214?locale=en_GB