The provision of useful, easy and reliable services sometimes involves placing small amounts of information on your device, for example, computer or mobile phone. This information include small files known as cookies. They cannot be used to identify you personally.
Cookies are used to improve services for you through, for example:
- enabling a service to recognise your device so you don't have to give the same information during one task
- recognising that you have already given a username and password so you don't need to enter it for every web page requested
- measuring how many people are using services, so they can be made easier to use and that there is enough capacity to ensure they are fast
You can manage these small files yourself and learn more about them from allaboutcookies.org (opens new window).
How we use Cookies
The list below shows all of the cookies that are set by this website and the third-party services we use. If you have any queries about these cookies or would like more information about them, please get in touch.
Improving service
Google Analytics sets cookies to help us accurately estimate the number of visitors to the website and volumes of usage. This is to ensure that the website is available when you want it and to help us understand what you want to use.
| Name | Typical Content | Expires |
_utma
|
randomly generated number |
2 years |
| _utmb |
randomly generated number |
30 minutes |
| _utmc |
randomly generated number |
When you close your browser |
| _utmz |
randomly generated number and information on how the site was reached (e.g. direct or via a link, organic search or paid search) |
6 months |
For further details on the cookies set by Google Analytics, please refer to the Google Code website (opens new window).
Managing your visit
We use a number of cookies to remember your selections or preferences that you've made when looking at the information on this site.
| Name | Typical Content | Expires |
| ASP.NET_SessionId |
randomly generated text |
When you close your browser |
| FormCookie |
randomly generated number and a record of having completed a survey
|
1 year
|
Social Media
We use a third-party service, AddThis, to allow you to share content on social media websites. AddThis and social media websites with which you share may collect information sent by your browser as part of a web page request, such as cookies or your IP address.
When a page is shared, Acando use information from AddThis to help us estimate usage of our website.
More information on how AddThis use data can be found here (opens new window). For more information on use of data by other third-parties see their respective websites.