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Privacy and cookies

How government websites use cookies

We are strongly committed to protecting the privacy of users of this website, and do all that we can to protect information about participants.

Data protection

Any information you provide will be held securely and in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998. Your personal details will not normally be disclosed to third parties. In some circumstances however we may need to disclose your personal details to a third party so that they can provide a service you have requested, or fulfill a request for information. Any information about you that we pass to a third party will be held securely by that party, in accordance with the Data Protection Act 1998, and used only to provide the services or information you have requested.

You have a right to request a copy of your personal details at any time to check the accuracy of the information held. If you want to ask whether we hold any personal data relating to you, please contact us.

Information we collect from visitors

We collect information from visitors relating to:

  • feedback submitted to us
  • comments submitted to this website
  • site usage tracking

1. Feedback

If you provide feedback about the website through a contact form or email address we will only use this information to develop and improve the site. Publishers of documents using this service may seek feedback, which they will use to answer questions, resolve problems or improve their published information.

2. Site usage tracking

i) Cookies

To make this site simpler, we sometimes place small data files on your computer. These are known as cookies. Most big websites do this too.

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 (eg your postcode) 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. Indeed, you can manage and/or delete these small files as you wish.

To learn more about cookies and how to manage them, visit AboutCookies.org.

We use Google Analytics to collect information about how people use this site. We do this to make sure it’s meeting its users’ needs and to understand how we could do it better.

Google Analytics stores information about what pages you visit, how long you are on the site, how you got here and what you click on. We do not collect or store your personal information (eg your name or address) so this information cannot be used to identify who you are. We do not allow Google to use or share our analytics data.

The following cookies are set by Google Analytics:

Name Typical Content Expires
_utma randomly generated number 2 years
_utmb randomly generated number 30 minutes
_utmc randomly generated number when you close your browser
_utmx randomly generated number 2 years
_utmxx randomly generated number 2 years
_utmz randomly generated number and information on how the site was reached (e.g. direct or via a link, organic search or paid search) 6 months

ii) Log files
Log files allow us to record visitors’ use of the site. These logs are automatically generated from all our visitors, which we use to make improvements to the layout of the site and to the information in it, based on the way that visitors move around it. Log files do not contain any personal information about you.