When we provide services, we want to make them easy, useful and reliable. Where services are delivered on the internet, this sometimes involves placing small amounts of information on your device, for example, computer or mobile phone.
These include small files known as cookies. They cannot be used to identify you personally. These pieces of information are used to improve services for you through, for example:
- enabling a service to recognise your device so you don’t have to give the same information several times during one task
- recognising that you may already have given a username and password so you don’t need to do it for every web page requested
- measuring how many people are using services, so they can be made easier to use and there’s enough capacity to ensure they are fast
- analysing anonymised data to help us understand how people interact with government services so we can make them better
You can manage these small files and learn more about them from the article, Internet Browser cookies – what they are and how to manage them.
Current cookies
We use a series of cookies to monitor website speed and usage, as well as to ensure that any preferences you have selected previously are the same when you return to our website.
| Name of Cookie | Provider | Purpose |
| _ga | Used to distinguish users. | |
| _gid | Used to distinguish users. | |
| _gat | Used to throttle request rate. |
Full details on the cookies set by Google Analytics are published on the Google website. Google also publishes a browser add-on to allow you to choose that information about your website visit is not sent to Google Analytics.
