Should you need urgent health advice please contact your GP or call NHS 111. In an emergency please visit A&E or call 999.

Cookie Policy

Because use of your personal information and your privacy are very important, we are very careful about this website’s use of cookies.

About cookies

A cookie is a simple text file that gets downloaded onto your computer when you visit a website. Cookies are used for many different functions including auto-filling forms, counting visitors, storing shopping basket items, personalising content, targeting advertising, recording user preferences and for authentication and security.  You can restrict or block cookies at any time using your browser settings.

Types of Cookies

There are two types of cookie you may encounter when using a website:

First party cookies – these are our own cookies, controlled by us and used to provide information about usage of our site.

Third party cookies – these are cookies found in other companies‚ internet tools which we are using to enhance our site, for example Facebook or Twitter have their own cookies, which are controlled by them.

First party cookies

We use cookies that are necessary for technical reasons in order to enable a personalised experience.  We record your selection between the Kids and Grownups sections of the website and your chosen local area; these will expire after one hour.

We use cookies that are necessary to remember if you have acknowledged our Cookie Notice displayed on entering the site and any cookie preferences you have selected, these will expire after one year.

We also record your anonymous identifier issued by the server when you visit the website, this will expire at the end of the browsing session.

Third party cookies

We sometimes embed video, images or other content from websites such as YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr and Twitter. We may also allow you to share links to content on our site with other websites by the use of share buttons.

Google Analytics cookies

We use ‘ __utma, __utmb, __utmc, __utmz’ cookies to collect information about how visitors use our site.  We use the information to compile reports and to help us improve the site.

The cookies collect information in an anonymous form, including the number of visitors to the site, where visitors have come to the site from and the pages they visited.  See Google’s Privacy Policy to find out more.

YouTube cookies

‘PREF, SID, VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE, demographics, LOGIN_INFO, HSID, SSID, use_hitbox’ are all typically written to the browser upon the loading of YouTube videos.  See Google’s Policies and Principles to find out more.

Google Maps cookies

‘NNID, PREF, khcookie’ are all typically written to the browser upon the loading of Google Maps and Street View.

ReachDeck cookies

This website uses ReachDeck, an accessibility and reading support add-on that helps you to read the content. To learn more about ReachDeck, visit www.texthelp.com

ReachDeck stores some data in the Local Storage in your browser, to enable the add-on to work correctly and remember your preferences. Examples of preferences include colour choices, translation language choices, or screen mask configuration. Look at the ReachDeck user settings panel to see all the different types of information.

ReachDeck also stores the toolbar state. This ensures that when you enable an icon, it will remain enabled when you return to the website, or navigate to another page.

ReachDeck does not transmit any of this information to Texthelp servers.

Removing cookies

Learn how to remove cookies set on your device

Page last reviewed: 11-11-2021

Next review due: 11-11-2022