A cookie is a piece of information that is saved to the hard drive of your computer or mobile device. It remembers information about the configuration of your computer or mobile device and will remember that you’ve visited before. This improves your website browsing experience by storing information so that you don’t have to give it several times.

A cookie typically doesn’t contain personal information, but other browsing details such as the domain from which the cookie has come from, a random unique identifier code and also the lifetime (expiry) of the cookie.

How we use this information

We use the information gathered by cookies to measure information about our website usage. We can learn which pages on our site are being viewed and how many visitors are using the different sections of this website. This information helps us assess how useful the site is to our visitors and improve the usability of the website on an ongoing basis.

There are a wide range of website analytics tools available. Our provider is Google Analytics – a third party that provides monitoring and analysis services. Google Analytics reporting helps us understand how many visitors we have and which pages are visited and helps us improve and develop our site. Google Analytics uses a cookie to track the number of unique users of the site, but does not enable us to identify any individuals.

How to disable the cookies

You can disable the cookies that we attach if your browser supports this.

To check and update your cookies settings, you will need to know what browser you are using (Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari or any other) and what version of it you have. You can usually find this out by opening the browser, then clicking on ‘Help’ and then ‘About’. This will give you information about the browser version you are using.

To find out how to manage cookies please refer to www.aboutcookies.org or your browser’s help options for more information.

Please remember that if you amend your cookie settings your browsing experience may be negatively affected. For example, if you have set preferences on a website (such as your location for local news or weather forecasts), it will no longer remember these.