Information about the use of our cookies
Our website uses cookies to distinguish you from other users of our website. This helps us to provide you with a good experience when you browse our website and also allows us to improve our site.
A cookie is a small file of letters and numbers that we store on your browser or the hard drive of your computer if you agree. Cookies contain information that is transferred to your computer's hard drive.
We use the following cookies:
- Strictly necessary cookies. These are cookies that are required for the operation of our website. They include, for example, cookies that enable you to use the contact section of our website.
- Analytical/performance cookies. They allow us to recognise and count the number of visitors and to see how visitors move around our website when they are using it. This helps us to improve the way our website works, for example, by ensuring that users are finding what they are looking for easily.
- Functionality cookies. These are used to recognise you when you return to our website. This enables us to personalise our content for you, greet you by name and remember your preferences (for example, your choice of language or region).
You can find more information about the individual cookies we use and the purposes for which we use them in the table below:
Purpose/Activity
Type of data
__atuvc
This cookie is associated with the AddThis social sharing widget which is commonly embedded in websites to enable visitors to share content with a range of networking and sharing platforms. It stores an updated page share count.
__atuvs
This cookie is associated with the AddThis social sharing widget which is commonly embedded in websites to enable visitors to share content with a range of networking and sharing platforms.
__utma
This cookie lasts for 2 years by default and distinguishes between users and sessions. It is used to calculate new and returning visitor statistics. The cookie is updated every time data is sent to Google Analytics.
__utmz
This cookie identifies the source of traffic to the site - so Google Analytics can tell us where visitors came from when arriving on the site. The cookie has a life span of 6 months and is updated every time data is sent to Google Analytics.
_gat
This cookie is used to throttle the request rate - limiting the collection of data on high traffic sites. It expires after 10 minutes.
_ga
This cookie is used to distinguish unique users by assigning a randomly generated number as a client identifier. It is included in each page request in a site and used to calculate visitor, session and campaign data for the sites analytics reports. By default it is set to expire after 2 years, although this is customisable by website owners.
_gid
This cookie stores and updates a unique value for each page visited.
ARRAffinity
This cookie is used for load balancing to make sure the visitor page requests are routed to the same server in any browsing session.
ASP.NET_SessionId
Type of daGeneral purpose platform session cookie, used by sites written with Miscrosoft .NET based technologies. Usually used to maintain an anonymised user session by the server.ta
You block cookies by activating the setting on your browser that allows you to refuse the setting of all or some cookies. However, 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.