Our website (including our mobile site) uses cookies. Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer or mobile device when you visit our website and are very important to help us make online services easier to use, to monitor the use of our site and to help us improve the service to you.

Our website uses both session cookies and persistent cookies. Cookies are very important to help us make online services easier to use, to monitor the use of our site and to help us improve the service to you. Session cookies enable you to move from page to page within our website and any information you enter to be remembered. A session cookie is deleted when you close your browser or after a short time. Persistent cookies allow our website to remember your preferences and settings when you visit our website in the future. Persistent cookies expire after a set period of time.

Some of the ways in which cookies are used on our website:

Google Analytics – we use Google Analytics to provide us with information about how you use our website. We use this information to compile statistics and to help us to improve our website and the services we offer. Google uses cookies as part of this process to collect anonymous information, including the number of visitors to the website, where they have come to the website from, the pages they visit and the length of time they have spent on the website.

contact us – we use a session cookie on our contact us page to allow you to contact us via our website.

mobile site – we use persistent cookies and session cookies on our mobile site to enable the site to work effectively and to remember your preferences and settings.

video content – we use an online video software provider to host and play our video content. That provider uses session cookies to collect certain non-personally identifiable information about you when you view our videos, including your IP address, browser type, Internet Service Provider and operating system. They also collect information relating to how videos are played, including when and for long, and whether they are played in full screen mode. This information helps them to monitor how their software is being used and us to monitor how our videos are being viewed.

email subscriptions service – session cookies are used in our email subscriptions service to track recipients’ interaction with our email updates and to facilitate our online subscriptions manager website.

The use of cookies in these ways is to improve the functionality of our website and your experience when using it. Cookies can be disabled by changing the settings on your browser. However, many of the interactive functions on our website are dependent on cookies and disabling or blocking cookies can prevent these services from working or reduce their usefulness. If you do decide to disable cookies, you may not be able to access some areas of our website. Different web browsers may use different methods for managing cookies. For more about managing cookies, see All About Cookies.