What are cookies?
A cookie is a small text file on your computer, created by a website to store information about your visit, such as any preferences you set or the duration of your visit. Once a cookie is saved on your computer, only the website that created the cookie can read it. EU legislation states that a website must let you know when it uses cookies.
How do cookies benefit me?
Some of the cookies on legislation.gov.uk are used to remember things you have specifically selected, such as closing or opening the search panel, choosing a language, expanding and collapsing sections on tables of contents, dismissing notification banners. From time to time we conduct surveys to understand how we can make the site better for you, and we use cookies to stop the survey prompt from appearing if you have completed the survey, or if you have clicked to say you do not want to be asked again.
Other cookies we use help us understand how people browse legislation.gov.uk. We use Google Analytics for this. All of the data we collect with Google Analytics is anonymous and we use it in an aggregated way, that means that we look at overall trends in browsing behaviour. We collect information such as how many people visit our website, what pages they visit and how long they spend on them, and how long they stay on the site for. We do not allow Google to use or share the data about how you use this site. Understanding how people browse legislation.gov.uk can help us identify areas that we need to improve, or fix problems that are preventing people from finding the information they need.
Are cookies safe?
As you may be aware, most websites use cookies. They won’t cause any harm to your device. Cookies don’t tell us who you are or give us any personal details about you. The data they help us collect is anonymous. We do not use cookies to look at individual journeys across the website, nor do we collect any data that could be used to personally identify you.