We sometimes place small data files on your computer. These are known as cookies. Most websites do this.

They improve things by:

  • remembering settings, so you don't have to keep re-entering them whenever you visit a new page
  • remembering information you've given so you don't need to keep entering it
  • measuring how you use the website so we can make sure it meets your needs

Our cookies aren't used to identify you personally. They're just here to make the site work better for you.

How we use cookies

We use cookies in several places – we've listed each of them below with more details about why we use them and how long they last.

Site requirements

The following cookies are necessary for our site to operate and do not contain personal data.

Cookie About
ASP.NET_SessionId
Session based

This is a general purpose platform session cookie, used by sites written with Microsoft .NET based technologies. This is a necessary cookie used to maintain anonymised user sessions by web servers for basic site functionality.

CookieConsent
365 days

This is a cookie used to remember that you have acknowledged our cookie statement (and prevent showing you our cookie banner on every page).

Website monitoring (SiteImprove)

We use a product called SiteImprove to collect information about how people use this site. We do this to make sure it's meeting our users' needs and to understand how we could do it better.

SiteImprove stores information about what pages are visited, how long for and what was clicked on. We do not collect or store personal information (e.g. your name or address) so this information cannot be used to identify who you are. We do not allow SiteImprove to use or share our analytics data with anyone.

Cookie About
nmstat
Persistent

This cookie is used to help record visitors' use of the website.

It is used to collect statistics about site usage such as when the visitor last visited the site.

This information is then used to improve the user experience on the website. This Siteimprove Analytics cookie contains a randomly generated ID used to recognize the browser when a visitor reads a page.

The cookie contains no personal information and is used only for web analytics.

siteimproveses
Session based

This cookie is used purely to track the sequence of pages a visitor looks at during a visit to the site.

This information is used to test user journeys that enable visitors to find relevant information more quickly.

cfduid
Persistent

This cookie is set by SiteImprove for a CloudFlare service to identify trusted web traffic. It does not correspond to any user, nor does the cookie store any personally identifiable information.

Embedded content and social media cookies

Our site has a number of pages with embedded videos or other content that utilise cookies from a third party to enable this.