Cookies
What are cookies and why do we use them?
Our website uses cookies. A cookie is a small file of letters and numbers that we put on your computer. These cookies allow us to distinguish you from other users of the website which helps us to provide you with a good experience when you browse our website and also allows us to improve our site.
Read more about the individual cookies we use and how to recognise them below.
Your consent
When you first visited this website, we presented you with a message explaining that we use cookies and invited you to read more about them here. We recommend you allow the cookies we set by this website as they help us provide a better service and make our website easier to use. If you do not want to receive certain cookies from this website, there are some that you can individually opt out of, please visit our cookies settings page to do this.
Alternatively, you can change the settings on your web browser to disallow them all. If you set your browser to refuse all cookies, some websites will not work in the way that you expect them to.
You can find out more about cookies by visiting: http://www.allaboutcookies.org/
The cookies we use
These are the cookies we use on our site:
| Cookie summary | Identifier(s) | What are they for? | How necessary are they? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cookie information banner | ASP.NET_SessionId | Controls the appearance of the cookies information banner that pops up when you first visit the site. This cookie is set on arrival to the site by default. It expires after a set time and is not set again unless a user changes their cookie settings. | We need to show you this message so you know about our cookies. |
| Load balancing | ARRAffinity | 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. | This is strictly necessary to provide the best performance of the site. |
| Website forms authentication | .DMBCWEBLIVEAUTH | This cookie contains the encrypted forms authentication ticket. The ticket passed by the cookie is used by forms authentication, on the server, to identify an authenticated user. | Without this you will not be able to sign in to the site to access secure functionality. |
| Anti-forgery token | _RequestVerificationToken | This cookie contains an anti forgery token, to prevent cross-site request forgery attacks. It guarantees that the user posting the form is the same user that requested the form. | Without this you will not be able to submit any forms. |
| BrowseAloud | _ba_allow_secure _ba_launch_audio_alert | These control the functionality of BrowseAloud, a screenreader plugin we use to add speech, reading and translation support to our website. They remember things like where the toolbar is, if it is loaded and your speech & colour settings. | Without these, you will not be able to use the functionality offered by BrowseAloud effectively, if at all. |
| Google Analytics | _gid, _ga and _gat | These cookies are 'analytical' ones which do things like recognise and count the number of visitors and to see how visitors move around the site when they’re using it. This helps us to improve the way our website works, for example by making sure users are finding what they need easily. | We get useful information from these cookies which helps to improve the website for you and the value for money from any information campaigns we run. You can opt out of Google Analytics cookies if required. |