Cookie Policy

Cookies are text files containing small amounts of information which are downloaded to your personal computer, mobile or other device when you visit a website. Cookies are then sent back to the originating website on each subsequent visit, or to another website that recognises that cookie. Cookies are useful because they allow a website to recognise a user's device.

Cookies do lots of different jobs, like letting you navigate between pages efficiently, remembering your preferences, and generally improve the user experience. They can also help to ensure that adverts you see online are more relevant to you and your interests.

Our website uses cookies. A cookie is a small file of letters and numbers that we put on your computer if you agree. These cookies allow us to distinguish you from other users of our website, which helps us to provide you with a good experience when you browse our website and also allows us to improve our site. Read more about the individual cookies we use and how to recognise them below. Our privacy policy has been amended to reflect recent changes in legislation and details can be found here.

The cookies used on our website have been categorised based on the categories found in the ICC UK Cookie guide. A list of the kinds of cookies used on our website by category is set out below.

Strictly necessary cookies. These cookies are essential in order to enable you to move around our website and use its features, including accessing secure areas of our website.

Analytical/performance cookies. These cookies collect and analyse information about how visitors use our website. The service collects anonymous information such as the number of visitors to our website, where visitors have come from, behavioural patterns and pages visited on our website. For more information see the sections on Google Analytics and Hotjar (See below)

Functionality cookies. These cookies allow our website to remember choices you make (such as your name, language or the region you’re in) and provide enhanced, more personal features. These cookies can also be used to remember changes you have made to text size, fonts and other parts of web pages that you can customise. They may also be used to provide services you have asked for such as watching a video. The information these cookies collect may be anonymised and they cannot track your browsing activity on other websites.

We also use third party cookies (such as Google DoubleClick) to run Google Analytics Demographics and Interest Reporting. These cookies gather website visitor data (such as age, gender, and interests) and allow us to optimise website content and marketing. 

Site performance cookies: This type of cookie remembers your preferences on our site. Sometimes we also run tests on our site to determine whether our customers prefer a new feature or option, and anonymous site performance cookies can help us determine if this new feature or option is preferred by our customers so that we can continue to work hard on improving our site for you.

Analytics cookies: Every time someone visits our site, software that we have selected and which is provided by one or more other organisations generates an 'anonymous analytics cookie' which tell us whether or not you have visited our site before. Your browser will tell us if you have these cookies and, if you don't, we generate new ones. This allows us to track how many users we have, and how often they visit our site. We use these cookies to gather statistics such as the number of visits to any page on our site

Retargeting cookies: We use these cookies to determine the content of advertisements that we show on other websites. When you visit other sites on the web, such as news or information sites, this cookie lets our retargeting providers know when to serve advertisements and what content to show you. These cookies also allow us to know whether or not you've seen an advertisement, and how long it has been since you've seen it.

Functionality cookies: We use these cookies to help us serve you the best possible experience on our site. They enable properties to be 'favourited' and saved in your 'My Bookmarks' area.

Other third party cookies: On some pages of our site, other organisations may also set their own anonymous cookies. Because of how cookies work, our site cannot access these cookies. For example, when you share content using a Facebook share button, Facebook will record that you have done this.

Our website uses Google Analytics, a web analytics service provided by Google, Inc. ('Google'). Google Analytics uses cookies (text files placed on your computer) to help the website operators analyse how users use the site. The information generated by the cookie about your use of the website (including your IP address) will be transmitted to and stored by Google on servers in the United States. Google will use this information for the purpose of evaluating your use of the website, compiling reports on website activity for website operators and providing other services relating to website activity and internet usage. Google may also transfer this information to third parties where required to do so by law, or where such third parties process the information on Google's behalf. Google do not associate your IP address with any other data held by Google.

Users can opt-out of Google Analytics for Display Advertising and customise Google Display Network adverts at https://www.google.com/settings/ads

On our websites we use services provided by Hotjar Ltd. Hotjar provides services including Heatmaps, Visitor recordings, Funnels and Form Analysis, Feedback Polls, Surveys and user research. Hotjar is a tool that aggregates data on how people use our website.

Hotjar uses cookies to collect non-personal information including standard internet log information and details of your behavioural patterns upon visiting our website pages. We do this to provide you with a better experience, identify preferences, diagnose technical problems, analyse trends and to improve our website. The information generated by the tracking code and cookie about your use of the website will be stored by Hotjar on servers in Ireland on the Amazon Web Services infrastructure (eu-west-1 datacenter). Hotjar's application servers and database servers run inside an Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud). The database containing visitor and usage data is only accessible from the application servers and no outside sources are allowed to connect to the database. To opt out of Hotjar please go to the following link: https://www.hotjar.com/opt-out

You may refuse the use of cookies by selecting the appropriate settings in your browser. However, if you do this you may lose some useful functionality such as personalisation and 'keep me signed in' and 'remember me' features, and if you use your browser settings to block all cookies (including essential cookies) you may not be able to access all or parts of our site. You can find more information about cookies, including more detail on how to refuse them in individual browsers, at www.allaboutcookies.org and www.youronlinechoices.eu.