How we use cookies

This website will use cookies in order to improve your user experience by enabling this website to remember you, either for the duration of your visit (using a session cookie) or for repeat visits (using a persistent cookie).

Cookies do lots of different jobs, like letting you navigate between pages efficiently, storing your preferences, and generally improving your experience of a website. Cookies make the interaction between you and the website faster and easier. If you do not accept to use cookies, this website will think you are a new visitor every time you move to a new page on the site – for example, when you enter your login details and move to another page it won’t recognise you and it won’t be able to keep you logged in.

What is in a cookie?

A cookie is a simple text file that is stored on your computer or mobile device by a website’s server and only that server will be able to retrieve or read the contents of that cookie. Each cookie is unique to your web browser. It will contain some anonymous information such as a unique identifier and the site name and some digits and numbers. It allows a website to remember things like your preferences or what’s in your shopping basket.

Adobe Flash Player Cookies

The Adobe Flash Player, used to provide services such as iPlayer through web browsers or web-based games, is also capable of storing information on your device. However, these cookies cannot be controlled through your web browser. Some web browser manufacturers are developing solutions to allow you to control these through your browser, but at the present time, if you wish to restrict or block Flash Cookies, then you must do this on the Adobe website. Please be aware that restricting the use of Flash Cookies may affect the features available to you.

Third party cookies

We sometimes embed photos and video content from websites such as flickr and YouTube. Pages with this embedded content may present cookies from these websites. Similarly, when you use one of the share buttons, a cookie may be set by the service you have chosen to share content through. We do not control the dissemination of these cookies and accepting our cookies you will not block cookies from those websites. You should check the relevant third party website for more information about these.

We know that a lot of visitors to our website use social networking tools, so we have tried to make it easy for you to share our content using these services. We pull through content from social networks into our own pages, such as embedded Twitter feeds. The social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, may themselves also put cookies on your machine. We have little control over these ‘third party’ cookies, so we suggest that you check the respective privacy policies for these external services to help you understand what data these organisations hold about you and what they do with it. For instance, the Facebook Data Use Policy and the Twitter privacy policy give further information about those services.

Mobile device and TV apps

On devices such as mobile phones, tablets and smart TVs, instead of cookies, information collected from or stored to your device may be used to ‘remember’ you or provide you with the content you have requested.

What to do if you don’t want cookies to be set

Some people find the idea of a website storing information on their computer or mobile device a bit intrusive, particularly when this information is stored and used by a third party without them knowing. If you prefer, it is possible to block some or all cookies, or even to delete cookies that have already been set; but you need to be aware that you might lose some functions of that website. Please follow the link below choosing the web browser you are using.