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 develop and improve our website, as well as products and/or services in response to what you might need or want. By continuing to browse the site, you are agreeing to our use of cookies.
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.
Cookies are either:
Session cookies: these are only stored on your computer during your web session and are automatically deleted when you close your browser – they usually store an anonymous session ID allowing you to browse a website without having to log in to each page but they do not collect any personal data from your computer, or
Persistent cookies: a persistent cookie is stored as a file on your computer and it remains there when you close your web browser. The cookie can be read by the website that created it when you visit that website again. We use persistent cookies for Google Analytics.
We use the following cookies:
Strictly necessary cookies. These cookies are essential in order to enable you to move around the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the website. Without these cookies, services you have asked for, like shopping baskets or e-billing, cannot be provided. Because these cookies are strictly necessary we do not need to ask for your consent to use them.
Analytical/performance cookies. These cookies collect information about how visitors use a website, for instance, which pages visitors go to most often, and they let you store items in your shopping basket between visits. They may also show us which email or web page visitors clicked through from in order to visit our website, and whether you opened an email we sent you.
Some of these are analytics cookies, set using third party web analytics software, which allows us to monitor our website traffic. For example, we use Google Analytics cookies to help us do this. These analytics cookies may also tell us how many of our visitors are male or female, and may summarise the number of visitors who fall within certain age ranges, or certain interest categories. However, this sort of information is not linked to any individual; it just shows us what percentage of our visitors fall in particular categories.
We will not pass this data to third parties in such a way that would allow them to identify visitors personally. However, we may associate this cookie data with other personally identifiable data submitted by you (for instance when you submit a form, or partially complete a form, or leave items in your shopping basket), in order to make sure that our communications are as relevant to you as possible.
We may also use third-party cookies during e-commerce transactions to help prevent fraud.
Functionality cookies. These cookies allow our website to remember choices you make (such as your user name, language or the region you are in) and provide enhanced, more personal features. For instance, these cookies can 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 or commenting on a blog. The information these cookies collect may be anonymised and they cannot track your browsing activity on other websites.
Targeting cookies. These cookies record your visit to our website, the pages you have visited and the links you have followed. We will use this information to make our website and the advertising displayed on it more relevant to your interests. We may also share this information with third parties for this purpose.
If you click on a hyperlink from our website to any third-party websites (for example, if you ‘share’ content from our website with friends or colleagues through social networks), you may be sent cookies from these third-party websites. Third-party websites will have their own privacy and cookie policies which we cannot control. Please check the third-party websites for more information about their cookies and how to manage them.
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.
