Our Cookie Policy

AN INTRODUCTION TO COOKIES

 
A cookie is a small data file that is automatically placed onto your computer's hard drive. Cookie files are created by our website and placed onto your device in order to analyse and influence your preferences or behaviour. Analytical cookies are designed to track your journey and experience on our website, so that we may tailor your experience and gather data to help improve our service. Overall, cookies help us to provide you with a better website, by enabling us to monitor which pages you find useful and which you do not. A cookie in no way gives us access to your computer or any information about you, other than the data you choose to share with us.
The majority of modern web browsers will automatically allow cookies to be placed onto your device. However, you can usually modify your browser's settings to prevent any cookies from being placed onto your device. Setting your browser to block cookies may prevent you from taking full advantage of our website.
 
COOKIES DEPLOYED BY OUR WEBSITE:
• ensure that functionality operates as intended
• remember your choices and preferences during and between visits
• allow you to share pages via popular social media networks including Facebook and Twitter
• allow you to interact with our website by leaving comments or opinions
• post enquiries via online forms
• track your visit for statistical analysis, allowing us to improve the usability, speed and security of our website
 
COOKIES ARE NOT DEPLOYED TO:
• collect any personal, identifiable information (without your express permission)
• collect any sensitive information (without your express permission)
• pass data to advertising networks
• pass personally identifiable data to third parties
 
YOUR CONSENT FOR COOKIE DEPLOYMENT BY OUR WEBSITE
Upon your first visit to our website, you may have noticed our banner alerting you to the use of cookies by our website. In compliance with the 2011 EU Cookie Law, our website operates on an 'Implied Consent' basis. This means that we have assumed that you have 'opted-in' for our website to deploy cookies until you choose to deactivate them within your browser settings or via the instructions below. Below you can learn more about the specific cookies deployed by our website and how they can be disabled. For more information on the EU Cookie Law in the UK, we recommend visiting the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) website where you can find the latest information, guidelines and advice.
 
COOKIES USED BY OUR WEBSITE
 
SOCIAL NETWORK SHARING
We encourage users to share our content and/or like our profile on the popular social media websites Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn. In order to make 'social sharing' accessible, our website utilises widgets either provided directly from the social networks and/or via amalgamative widgets from third parties such as AddThis. Cookies and privacy implications from the social networks vary and will be dependent on your nominated privacy settings with each social network. Social sharing buttons will only deploy cookies if you are signed to that respective social network at the time of being on our website.
 
ANALYTICAL TRACKING
Our website has Google Analytics installed which allows us to track and compile anonymous visitor statistics. The information collected ranges from simple traffic volume to the type of browser you are viewing our website with. This information is valuable to us, not just for marketing analysis and quantification, but to improve the usability, security and load speed of our website content. Google Analytics is a popular, secure flagship webmaster product from Google. The privacy and security of Google Analytics data is a high priority at Google that you can read more about on Google's Analytics Data Safeguarding page. Google also offer a Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on that will allow you to automatically opt-out of all websites that track your activity via Google Analytics. No personal information is collected by Google Analytics.
 
COOKIE CONSENT CHECK
Upon your first visit to our website, you will notice a subtle banner on the page alerting you to the fact that cookies are being placed on your computer by our website. In order for our website to remember your choice of opting-in, we store a cookie which expires after the set amount of days below (see table).
 
ENQUIRY FORMS
Our website's visitors can choose to contact us via form(s) on our website. To prevent spam enquiries, we protect our forms with anti-spam challenges which ensure the visitor is an actual living person, rather than a computer bot or spider.
Most modern browsers allow you to control your cookie settings for all websites that you browse. You can disable cookie deployment completely by editing your browser settings; however, in doing so you may be limiting the functionality that is displayed on our website. To learn how to disable cookies on your preferred browser we recommend reading this advice posted by Google.
If you are concerned about cookies tracking your movements on the internet then you may be concerned about spyware. Spyware is the name given to a particular band of cookies that track personal information about you. There are many antispyware programs that you can use to prevent this from happening. Learn more about antispyware software - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyware. You call also disable Google Analytics on all websites by downloading the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on.

Further information about cookies

If you'd like to learn more about cookies in general and how to manage them, visit aboutcookies.org (opens in a new window).

Please note that we're not responsible for the content of external websites.