What Is A Cookie?

Cookies are text files containing small amounts of information, which your computer or mobile device downloads when you visit a website. When you return to these websites – or visit other websites that use the same cookies – they recognise these cookies and therefore your browsing device.

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

What Type Of Cookies Do We Use?

The type of cookies used on this website can be put into one of four categories based on the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) guide for cookie categories: Strictly Necessary, Performance, Functionality and Targeting.

Strictly Necessary Cookies – These cookies are essential in order to enable you to navigate our websites and to access secure content. Without these cookies, services you have asked for, such as internet banking facilities, cannot be provided. These cookies don’t gather information about you for profiling or targeted marketing purposes.

This category cannot be disabled using the cookies preference selection on this website.

Performance Cookies – These cookies collect anonymous information about how visitors use our websites, for instance which pages visitors go to most often, and if they get error messages from web pages. These cookies don’t collect personally identifiable information; the information collected is anonymous and is only used to improve the performance of our websites.

These cookies are not used to target you with online advertising and without these cookies we cannot learn how our website is performing, and make relevant enhancements that could help improve your experience when using our online services.

Functionality Cookies – These cookies allow our websites to remember choices you make (such as your user name, language or the region you're in) and tailor the website to provide enhanced features and content for you. These cookies can also be used to remember customisation changes that you may make (for example text size or fonts). They may also be used to provide services you asked for such as watching a video or commenting on a blog. The information these cookies collect is anonymous and cannot be used to track your browsing activity on other websites.

Without these cookies, a website cannot remember choices you've previously made or personalise your browsing experience.

Targeting Cookies – These cookies gather information about your browsing habits. They remember that you've visited a website and share this information with other organisations such as advertisers. They do this in order to provide you with adverts that are more relevant to you and your interests. Although these cookies can track your visits to other websites, they don’t usually know who you are.

Disabling these cookies will not stop online adverts from being displayed to you. However without these cookies, online adverts you encounter may be less relevant to you and your interests.

Setting Your Cookie Preferences

You can control how cookies are placed on your device either through the ‘Cookie Settings’ link near the bottom of the page or from within your browser.