Cookie Policy
Cookies on this website
We want to make our website and online services useful and reliable. This sometimes involves placing small amounts of information called cookies on your computer, mobile phone or other devices you use to access the internet.
Cookies do lots of different jobs, like letting you navigate between pages efficiently, enabling you to use services you have specifically asked for and remembering your preferences. They also give website operators useful, non-personal information about how people use their website. You can find more information about cookies on the Your Online Choices website and the About Cookies website.
How we use cookies
We do not use cookies for the general running of this website. However, we do use cookies to:
- enable services you have specifically asked for (such as paying for services)
- collect anonymous information using analytics tools (such as Google Analytics)
- remember choices you make (such as signing in to your library account)
- improve your experience of the website (such as watching videos from YouTube or viewing news feeds from Facebook and Twitter) or its performance.
The first time you visit our website we will ask you to either accept or decline that we can place these types of cookies on your device. Following this first visit we will ask you again every 30 days to accept or decline the use of cookies.
We do not use cookies on our main website that collect information about your browsing habits in order to make advertising relevant to you and your interests.
Third Party Cookies
We embed videos from YouTube and news feeds from other websites such as Facebook and Twitter to enhance the user experience of our websites. These third party websites place cookies on your device when watching or viewing these pages. Below are links to their cookie policies:
- Google privacy policy for YouTube and all its websites
- Twitter privacy policy
- Facebook privacy policy
We sometimes work with external marketing agencies to help drive recruitment and deliver campaigns for the council. We may allow these agencies to use analytics tools, such as DoubleClick, on relevant pages of our site to help evaluate the impact of these campaigns. When you visit one of these pages, third party cookies will be placed on your device. These cookies collect anonymous information that may include details about the pages you visit. Any data collected will be accessible by the marketing agency.
The cookies we use fall into 3 categories:
1) Strictly necessary cookies
These cookies enable services you have specifically asked for. They are essential in order to enable you to move around the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the website. Without these cookies services such as submitting online application forms cannot be provided.
2) Performance cookies
These cookies collect anonymised information on the pages visited. These cookies collect information about how visitors use a website, for instance which pages visitors go to most often, and if they get error messages from web pages. These cookies allow Google Analytics to track performance by tracking the IP address of visitors. Google Analytics anonymizes the address as soon as technically feasible at the earliest possible stage of the collection network. The full IP address is never written to disk in this case. This information is only used to improve how our website works.
3) Functional cookies
These cookies remember choices you make to improve your experience. These cookies allow the website to remember choices you make (such as your user name, language or the region you are in) and provide enhanced, more personal features. For instance, a website may be able to provide you with local weather reports or traffic news by storing in a cookie the region in which you are currently located. These cookies can also be used to remember changes you have made to text size, fonts and other parts of web pages that you can customise. They may also be used to provide services you have asked for such as watching a video or commenting on a blog. The information these cookies collect may be anonymised and they cannot track your browsing activity on other websites.
Opting out
You can stop cookies being downloaded to your computer or other device by selecting the appropriate settings on your browser. However, if you do this you may not be able to use the full functionality of this website.
There is more information about how to delete or stop using cookies on the About Cookies website. If you wish, you can also opt out of being tracked by Google Analytics.