Cookies

This service puts small files (known as ‘cookies’) onto your computer to collect information about how you browse the site.

Cookies are used to:

These cookies aren’t used to identify you personally.

Find out more about how to manage cookies.

How cookies are used on this service

Measuring website usage

We collect logs on our servers that tell us how people use this site. We do this to make sure it’s meeting your needs and to understand how we could do it better. Cookies are used to give us more information in these logs.

The logs are analysed to tell us what pages you visit, how long you are on the site, how you got here and what you click on. We do not collect or store your personal information (eg your name or address) so this information cannot be used to identify who you are.

We do not allow external organisations to access, use or share any of this analytics data, which is stored on in-house servers.

Our analytics tools set the following cookies:

Name Purpose Expires
_pk_id This lets us know if you’ve visited before, so we can count how many of our visitors are new to GOV.UK or to a certain page 393 days
_pk_ses This works with _pk_id to calculate when you leave our website 30 minutes

Managing your current visit

Name Purpose Expires
ASP.NET_SessionId A 'session identifier' which allows the site to recognise your movement around the site as being from one computer When you close your browser
_RequestVerificationToken_(17 alpha numeric characters) An 'identifier' that helps prevent fraudulent requests to the site When you close your browser
ANONID & DUG A 'session identifier' to manage automated traffic visiting our website When you close your browser

We sometimes use Questback to collect responses to our satisfaction survey from links provided in our emails. Questback may also set cookies. Further information can be found at the Questback privacy statement