This page should be read as an extension of the National Co-ordinating Centre of Public Engagement (NCCPE)'s privacy policy.

What are cookies?

Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer by websites that you visit. They are widely used to make websites work or work more efficiently. For example, they may be required to keep you logged in to a service, or to remember your choice of accessibility settings. A cookie will typically contain a record of the web site which issued it, its own name, and a value which is often a randomly generated unique number.

The cookie will also have a “lifetime”, which tells your browser when to delete it. Cookies can be “session cookies” or “persistent cookies”. Session cookies are temporary and should be deleted by your browser when you quit. Persistent cookies can remain on your hard drive indefinitely (how long will depend on the lifetime of the specific cookie) and may continue to be accessed via your browser.

Can I turn off cookies?

You can manually disable cookies on your computer, or delete existing cookies. You may also be able to view the cookies already in your system. This will depend on your browser, please consult the appropriate website for your browser.

However, please note that cookies are essential to the effective functioning of some of the services we offer online. If you disable cookies, a number of important functions and services will be unavailable to you and our website may not operate correctly in your browser.

Which type of cookie does the NCCPE use?

Where the NCCPE uses cookies they will be session cookies with the following exceptions:

Cookie agreement

This cookie keeps track of whether a website user has agreed to the cookie pop-up, and expires in 100 days.

Session ID

This cookie is used by our website to keep track of logged-in users, and expires in 23 days.

Google Analytics

Some parts of this website use Google Analytics which also place cookies on your computer. The information generated by these cookies about your use of this website will be transmitted to and stored by Google.

The NCCPE will not use the statistical analytics tools to track or to collect personally identifiable information of visitors to this website. The NCCPE will not associate any data gathered with any personally identifying information from any source as part of our use of the statistical analytics tools.

We use Google Analytics cookies to hold information about your visit to our site. This helps us better identify the use and popularity of our services and how successfully the website is functioning.

If you do not wish us to do this, you can opt out of the Analytics service by installing an extension for your browser. Alternatively you can delete/restrict the cookies as for any other cookie.

Social buttons

On many of our site's web pages you will see ‘social buttons'. These enable users to share or bookmark web pages. There are buttons for Facebook and Twitter.

In order to implement these buttons, and connect them to the relevant social networks and external sites, scripts from domains outside the NCCPE are used. You should be aware that these sites are likely to be collecting information about your internet browsing, including on the NCCPE's site.

External web services

When you visit our site you may notice some cookies that are not related to the NCCPE. We sometimes use external web services on the NCCPE site, mostly to display content within our web pages. For example, to display videos we use YouTube.

As with the social buttons, we cannot prevent these sites, or external domains, from collecting information on your usage of this embedded content.