Cookies Policy

By accessing and using our website you are agreeing to our Cookie Policy. Please read this policy so you know what we are doing with your information.

This cookie policy was last updated on June 4 2012 to comply with the EU Cookie Law. For more information on the law, see the Information Commissioner’s Office website: www.ico.gov.uk/cookies

Cookies and how they benefit you

Our website uses cookies, as almost all websites do, to help provide you with the best experience we can. Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer or mobile phone when you browse websites.

Our cookies help us:

  • Make our website work as you’d expect
  • Improve the speed/security of the site
  • Allow you to share pages with social networks like Facebook
  • Continuously improve our website for you
  • Make our marketing more efficient 


We do not use cookies to:

  • Collect any personally 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
  • Pay sales commissions


You can learn more about all the cookies we use below.

Granting us permission to use cookies

If the settings in your browser are adjusted to accept cookies then by viewing our site you are consenting the use of these cookies.  Should you wish to remove or not use cookies from our site you can learn how to do this below, however doing so will likely mean that our site will not work as you would expect.

More about our Cookies

Website Function Cookies

We use cookies to make our website work including:

  • PHPSESSID, which does not track anything and is deleted as soon as you leave the site


There is no way to prevent these cookies being set other than to not use our site.

Third party functions

Our site, like most websites, includes functionality provided by third parties. Some third party cookies are set by services that appear on our pages. They are set by the operators of that service and are not in our control.

Disabling these cookies will likely break the functions offered by these third parties

Social Website Cookies

So you can easily ‘Like’ or share our content on the likes of Facebook and Twitter we have included sharing buttons on our site.

Cookies are set by:

  • AddThis/Share This provide us with lots of sharing buttons all in one neat package
The privacy implications on this will vary from social network to social network and will be dependent on the privacy settings you have chosen on these networks and whether you are logged into them when you visit the site.

Anonymous Visitor Statistics Cookies

We use Google Analytics, a popular web analytics service provided by Google, Inc. Google Analytics uses cookies to help us to analyse how users use the site. It tells us how many people have visited our website, what type of technology they are using (for example Mac or Windows which helps to identify when our site isn’t working as it should for particular technologies), how visitors found the site or the average number of pages a visitor views.

The information generated by the cookie about your use of our website (including your IP address) will be transmitted to and stored by Google on servers in the United States. Google will use this information for the purpose of evaluating your use of our website, compiling reports on website activity and providing other services relating to website activity and internet usage.

Google may also transfer this information to third parties where required to do so by law, or where such third parties process the information on Google’s behalf.

Google undertakes not to associate your IP address with any other data held by Google.

Google Analytics sets four different cookies:

  • _utma This cookie helps us determine the number of unique visitors to our website.
  • _utmz This cookie helps us determine the referral method for people visiting our website. This helps us to analyse the traffic arriving at our website and to determine which are the most popular routes (e.g. direct, search engine search, email link).
  • _utmb We use this Google Analytics cookie to help us to record the length of individual sessions from our users on our website. Each time you move to a new page within our website within 30 minutes of arriving the cookie updates so that we know that you are still actively using our website within a single session.
  • _utmc Similar to _utmb, we use this Google Analytics cookie to help us record the length of individual sessions on our website.


Turning Cookies Off

You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies (Learn how at http://www.aboutcookies.org/Default.aspx?page=1 ).  Doing so however will likely limit the functionality of our site and a large proportion of the world’s websites as cookies are a standard part of most modern websites.

It may be that you concerns around cookies relate to so called “spyware”. Rather than switching off cookies in your browser you may find that anti-spyware software achieves the same objective by automatically deleting cookies considered to be invasive.