1. Intro­duc­tion

When we pro­vide ser­vices, we want to make them easy, use­ful and reli­able. Where ser­vices are deliv­ered on the inter­net, this some­times involves plac­ing small amounts of infor­ma­tion on your device, for exam­ple, your com­puter or mobile phone. These include small files known as cook­ies. They can­not be used to iden­tify you personally.

These pieces of infor­ma­tion are used to improve ser­vices for you through, for example:

• enabling a ser­vice to recog­nise your device so you don’t have to give the same infor­ma­tion sev­eral times dur­ing one task
• recog­nis­ing that you may already have given a user­name and pass­word so you don’t need to do it for every web page requested
• mea­sur­ing how many peo­ple are using ser­vices, so they can be made eas­ier to use and there’s enough capac­ity to ensure they are fast
• analysing anonymised data to help us under­stand how peo­ple inter­act with government ser­vices so we can make them better

You can man­age these small files and learn more about them from the arti­cle, Inter­net Browser cook­ies – what they are and how to man­age them.

If you’d like to learn how to remove cook­ies set on your device, visit: About Cookies.

2. ‘First-party’ cookies

We don’t use these.

3. ‘Third-party’ cookies

We use a num­ber of sup­pli­ers who may also set cook­ies on their web­sites on its behalf.

Cook­ies for improv­ing service

Google Ana­lyt­ics

We use Google Ana­lyt­ics to col­lect infor­ma­tion about how peo­ple use this site. We do this to make sure the site is meet­ing users’ needs and to under­stand how we could do it better.

Google Ana­lyt­ics stores infor­ma­tion about what pages you visit, how long you’re on the site, how you got here and what you click on. We do not col­lect or store your per­sonal infor­ma­tion (e.g. your name or address) so this infor­ma­tion can­not be used to iden­tify who you are. We do not allow Google to use or share our ana­lyt­ics data.

The fol­low­ing cook­ies are set by Google Analytics:

Name: _utma
Pur­pose: Google Ana­lyt­ics sets cook­ies to help us accu­rately esti­mate the num­ber of vis­i­tors to the web­site and vol­umes of usage, e.g. web­site sta­tis­tics. This to ensure that the ser­vice is avail­able when you want it and fast
Typ­i­cal con­tent: ran­domly gen­er­ated num­ber
Expires: 2 years
Fur­ther infor­ma­tion: Google Ana­lyt­ics

Name: _utmb
Pur­pose: Google Ana­lyt­ics sets cook­ies to help us accu­rately esti­mate the num­ber of vis­i­tors to the web­site and vol­umes of usage, e.g. web­site sta­tis­tics. This cookie is used to determine new sessions/visits.
Typ­i­cal con­tent: ran­domly gen­er­ated num­ber
Expires: 30 min­utes
Fur­ther infor­ma­tion: Google Ana­lyt­ics

Name: _utmc
Pur­pose: Not used in ga.js. Set for interoperability with urchin.js. Historically, this cookie operated in conjunction with the __utmb cookie to determine whether the user was in a new session/visit.
Typ­i­cal con­tent: ran­domly gen­er­ated num­ber
Expires: when user exits browser
Fur­ther infor­ma­tion: Google Ana­lyt­ics

Name: _utmt
Pur­pose: Performance – used to throttle request rate.
Typ­i­cal con­tent: ran­domly gen­er­ated num­ber
Expires: 10 minutes
Fur­ther infor­ma­tion: Google Ana­lyt­ics

Name: _utmz
Pur­pose: Google Ana­lyt­ics sets cook­ies to help us accu­rately esti­mate the num­ber of vis­i­tors to the web­site and vol­umes of usage, e.g. web­site sta­tis­tics. This cookie stores the traffic source or campaign that explains how the user reached the site.
Typ­i­cal con­tent: ran­domly gen­er­ated num­ber + info on how the site was reached (e.g. directly or via a link, organic search or paid search)
Expires: 6 months
Fur­ther infor­ma­tion: Google Ana­lyt­ics

You can opt out of Google Analytics cookies.

4. How to con­trol and delete cookies

We will not use cook­ies to col­lect per­son­ally iden­ti­fi­able infor­ma­tion about you.

How­ever, if you wish to restrict or block the cook­ies which are set by our web­sites, or indeed any other web­site, you can do this through your browser set­tings. The ‘Help’ func­tion within your browser should tell you how.

Alter­na­tively, you may wish to visit About Cookies which con­tains com­pre­hen­sive infor­ma­tion on how to do this on a wide vari­ety of browsers. You will also find details on how to delete cook­ies from your machine as well as more gen­eral infor­ma­tion about cookies.

Please be aware that restrict­ing cook­ies may impact on the func­tion­al­ity of our website.

If you wish to view your cookie code, just click on a cookie to open it. You’ll see a short string of text and num­bers. The num­bers are your iden­ti­fi­ca­tion card, which can only be seen by the server that gave you the cookie.

For infor­ma­tion on how to do this on the browser of your mobile phone you’ll need to refer to your hand­set manual.

To opt-out of third-parties col­lect­ing any data regard­ing your inter­ac­tion on our web­site, please refer to their web­sites for fur­ther information.