Cookies on this site

This site, like many others, stores small files (called ‘cookies’) on your computer to collect information about how you use the site.

Cloudfare cookie

This site uses the Cloudfare service to speed up page load times. Cloudfare uses a cookie to identify safe web traffic. It does this by generating a random number. It does not store any personally identifiable information about you.

Cookie name What it does Expires
__cfduid Set by Cloudfare to identify individual clients behind a shared IP address and apply security settings on a per-client basis. 24 hours

Consent banner cookie

We use a cookie to remember that you’ve clicked on the ‘I accept’ button on the cookie banner at the bottom of the screen.

Cookie name What it does Expires
catAccCookies Set by the UK cookie consent plugin to record that you accept that the site uses cookies. 1 month

Google Analytics cookies

We track the number of visitors to the site using Google Analytics. However:

  • we do not send any personal information about you to Google Analytics
  • we anonymise your IP address before it’s sent to the Google Analytics servers, so there’s no way to identify which computer visited the site
  • we set the main Google Analytics cookie (_ga) to expire at the end of your browsing session, rather than the default 2 years – this means we do not track whether you’ve visited the site before
Cookie name What it does Expires
_ga Set by Google Analytics to track visitor information. After your browsing session
_gid Set by Google Analytics to group your entire browsing session together as the activity of one user. 24 hours
_gat Set by Google Analytics to limit the rate that data is sent to its servers. 1 minute

Find out more about the types of cookies used by Google.

How to switch cookies off

You can usually switch cookies off by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies.

This page on Wikihow takes you through the process of disabling cookies step by step for most of the major browsers.

You can also use Google’s Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on. It’s compatible with Chrome, Internet Explorer 11, Safari, Firefox and Opera. It stops data from your browsing activity being shared with Google Analytics.