Cookies
What is a cookie?
A cookie is a small text file on the user's browser and hard drive that uniquely identifies the user's browser. Cookies do a lot of useful things like letting you navigate between pages efficiently, remembering your preferences, generally improving your user experience and they can also ensure adverts you see online are more relevant to your interests.
There are several types of cookies:
Strictly necessary cookies: essential in order to enable you to move around the website and use its features, such as secure areas. These cookies enable services you have specifically asked for.
Performance cookies: these cookies collect information about how visitors use the website. These cookies don’t collect information that identifies a visitor; this information is aggregated and therefore anonymous.
Functionality cookies: these cookies allow the website to remember your choices and provide a more personal experience. The information they collect can be anonymised and they cannot track your browsing history.
Targeting or advertising cookies: used to deliver adverts more relevant to you and your interests and measure advert effectiveness. They collect data about your browsing habits and share this information with other organisations like advertisers.
There are also persistent cookies and session cookies. Session cookies are temporary and are erased when the browser exits. Persistent cookies remain on the user's hard drive until the user erases them or until they expire.
What cookies are in use on this site?
| Cookie Name/ID | Category | Purpose | 1st party or 3rd party? | Lifespan |
| cb-enabled | Functionality cookie | This cookie is associated with a free script which shows a cookie alert notice on a website. It is used to record when the user has dismissed the notice to prevent it re-appearing on return visits. | 1st party | 1 year |
| october_session | Functionality cookie | Estimates our audience size and usage pattern. | 1st party | 1 year |
| PHPSESSID | Functionality cookie | These cookies keep session than you close window. | 1st party | 1 hour |
| _utma | Performance cookie | These cookies help us to analyse how our visitors use our website. This enables us to make improvements to the site to give our users the best possible experience. | 3rdparty | 2 years |
| _utmb | Performance cookie | 3rdparty | 30 mins | |
| _utmc (deprecated) | Performance cookie | 3rdparty | n/a | |
| _utmz | Performance cookie | 3rdparty | 6 months |
How can you turn off cookies?
Please also be aware that we make every effort to respect your choices, however, there is the possibility that not all cookies will be captured. If this is a concern then we would recommend that you change your cookie settings via your browser; your browser help function will tell you how.
If, for example, you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer and you wish to block website cookies, you can perform the following:
On your browser tools menu, select 'Internet Options'
Click on the 'Privacy' tab and then on the 'Edit' button
Type into the 'Address of website' field the site you want to block
Click on the 'Block' button
Click on the OK button
Other browsers have similar cookie management abilities somewhere in their preferences settings, please refer to your browser's 'Help' facility.