Cookies

We use cookies on our website to make your experience as easy and simple as possible.

Cookies are small data files that we place on your computer. They improve your experience by:

  • remembering settings and information (like the names of health or social care services you’ve searched for) so you don’t have to keep re-entering them.
  • measuring how you use the website so we can make sure it meets your needs.

Cookies do not identify you personally.

Types of cookies and how we use them

Category 1: 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.

Category 2: performance cookies

These cookies collect information about how visitors use a website, for instance which pages visitors go to most often, and if they get error messages from web pages. These cookies don’t collect information that identifies a visitor. All information these cookies collect is aggregated and therefore anonymous. It is only used to improve how a website works.

Category 3: functionality cookies

These cookies allow the 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, a website may be able to provide you with local weather reports or traffic news by storing in a cookie the region in which you are currently located. These cookies can also 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.

Javascript

Some parts of our website use javascript – a web language – to display content. If your web browser has javascript disabled, it helps us to know so that we can display the page to you in another way. This cookie allows our website to know if you have javascript enabled or not.

Measuring website usage through Google analytics

We use Google Analytics to view statistics on the way you use our website. We can check:

  • how many people have visited our website and what content they look at.
  • how many times documents have been downloaded.
  • what people are looking for on our website.

We use the following third party cookies set by Google Analytics.

_ga
Used to distinguish users and expires after two years.

_gid
Used to distinguish users and expires after 24 hours.

_gat
Used to throttle request rate and expires after one minute.

For more information, please read Google’s Privacy Policy at www.google.com/policies/privacy/.

Managing the cookies on your computer

You can restrict or block cookies set by our website and others by changing the settings in your browser. Doing this however may impact the way our website works for you in the future.

Visit the About Cookies website at http://www.aboutcookies.org.uk/ to find out more about restricting or blocking cookies in different browsers.

You can opt out of Google Analytics tracking here https://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout

You can also learn more about cookies at www.gov.uk/support/cookies on the DirectGov website

Last updated May 2019