Reviewed: 26 February 2020
A cookie is a small file of letters and numbers that we store on your browser or the hard drive of your computer if you agree. Cookies contain information that is transferred to your computer’s hard drive.
We use the following cookies:
- Strictly necessary cookies: required for the operation of our site eg, cookies that enable a visitor to log into secure areas of our site, use a shopping cart or make use of e-billing services.
- Analytical/performance cookies: to recognise and count the number of visitors to our site and to see how they move around when using it. This helps us to improve the way our site works eg, by ensuring that users are finding what they are looking for easily.
- Functionality cookies: to recognise you when a visitor returns to our site. This enables us to personalise our content, greet by name and remember a visitors preferences eg, a choice of language or region.
- Targeting cookies: to record someones visit to our site, the pages they have visited and the links followed. We will use this information to make our site and the advertising displayed on it more relevant. We may also share this information with third parties for this purpose.
You can block cookies by activating the setting on your browser that allows you to refuse the setting of all or some cookies. However, if you use your browser settings to block all cookies (including essential cookies) you may not be able to access all or parts of our site.
More information about the cookies we use and why:
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cookieconsent_status (for functionality)
Controls whether or not you see the accept cookie bar.
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ASP.NET_SessionId (strictly necessary)
General purpose platform session cookie used by sites written with Microsoft .NET based technologies. Usually used to maintain an anonymised user session by the server.
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_fbp (for targeting)
Used by Facebook to deliver a series of advertisement products such as real time bidding from third party advertisers.
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_ga (for analytics)
This cookie name is associated with Google Universal Analytics - which is a significant update to Google's more commonly used analytics service. This cookie is used to distinguish unique users by assigning a randomly generated number as a client identifier. It is included in each page request in a site and used to calculate visitor, session and campaign data for the site’s analytics reports. By default, it is set to expire after 2 years, although this is customisable by website owners.
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_gcl_au (for targeting)
Used by Google AdSense for experimenting with advertisement efficiency across websites using their services.
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_hjid (for analytics)
Hotjar cookie. This cookie is set when the customer first lands on a page with the Hotjar script. It is used to persist the random user ID, unique to that site on the browser. This ensures that behaviour in subsequent visits to the same site will be attributed to the same user ID.
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rxVisitor (for functionality)
This cookie is used to store an anonymous ID for the user to correlate across sessions on the world service.
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TawkConnectionTime (for functionality)
This cookie is usually set by a website utilizing Taw.to, which is a Live chat service. This cookie remembers the end user so that past chat conversations can be identified to improve service.
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UMB-XSRF-TOKEN (strictly necessary)
These are backend specific cookies. They are only seen by site administrators accessing the back end of the website. They are used in maintaining the session state of the logged in user.
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UMB-XSRF-V (strictly necessary)
These are backend specific cookies. They are only seen by site administrators accessing the back end of the website. They are used in maintaining the session state of the logged in user.
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UMB_UCONTEXT_C (strictly necessary)
These are backend specific cookies. They are only seen by site administrators accessing the back end of the website. They are used in maintaining the session state of the logged in user.
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__RequestVerificationToken (strictly necessary)
This is an anti-forgery cookie set by web applications built using ASP.NET MVC technologies. It is designed to stop unauthorised posting of content to a website, known as Cross-Site Request Forgery. It holds no information about the user and is destroyed on closing the browser.
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ARRAffinity (strictly necessary)
This cookie is set by websites run on the Windows Azure cloud platform. It is used for load balancing to make sure the visitor page requests are routed to the same server in any browsing session.
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Ai_session (performance)
This cookie is associated with the Microsoft Application Insights software, which collects statistical usage and telemetry information for apps built on the Azure cloud platform. This is a unique anonymous session identifier cookie.
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Ai_user (performance)
This cookie is associated with the Microsoft Application Insights software, which collects statistical usage and telemetry information for apps built on the Azure cloud platform. This is a unique user identifier cookie enabling counting of the number of users accessing the application over time.
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system_Date_Format (functionality)
This cookie ensures that the date format used by the visitor is the same as the format used by the server.
