Cookies

The short version

We set one cookie. It records the choice you made when you were asked, so that we do not ask you again and so that nothing you refused is ever loaded.

Nothing else is stored on your device unless you say yes to it. If you refuse everything, the only cookie on this site is the one remembering that you refused, and the site works exactly as well.

The cookie we set

Name	Purpose	Lifetime	Category
pp_consent_v1	Records which categories of cookie you allowed, so you are not asked twice and nothing you refused is loaded	12 months	Strictly necessary

It is a first-party cookie, readable only by this site. It holds your choices, the version of the question you were asked, and the date you answered. It holds no identifier, nothing about who you are and nothing about what you read.

It is strictly necessary in the proper sense of that phrase: it exists to honour a refusal. Without it we would have no way to remember that you said no, and the only alternative would be to ask you on every page.

What we do not set

Three categories are offered when you are asked: analytics, preferences and marketing. None of them currently sets a cookie, because nothing on the site uses them yet. The machinery is in place ahead of the need, and when a category starts being used this page will list the cookie by name, with its purpose and its lifetime, before it is set for the first time.

If you allowed a category and nothing appears in this table for it, nothing is being stored.

Measuring without cookies

We want to know which pages people read and where they arrived from, and we would rather do that without storing anything on your device at all. The measurement we use is Cloudflare Web Analytics, which counts page views and referrers without a cookie, without an identifier and without following you between sites. It needs no consent because there is nothing to consent to.

We also count a handful of actions the same way. When somebody follows a link from one of our pages out to a firm's own website, finishes the cost calculator or starts the enquiry form, we add one to a total. What is stored is a number against a date, an action and, where it applies, which firm's page it happened on. There is no record of a person: no identifier, no session, nothing about you, and no way to put two actions together and say the same person did both.

We count it because this site publishes what firms charge and links to the firm's own page, so you are free to read a price here and ring the firm without us. We would like to know roughly how often that happens, because it decides how the site is paid for. Knowing how many is enough, and we would rather hold nothing about who.

Where we can measure something without storage, that is what we will do, and the consent question exists for the cases where we cannot.

Your controls

Use the Manage cookies link in the footer to change your answer at any time. Withdrawing permission is exactly as easy as giving it, and takes effect immediately.

Every browser also lets you block or delete cookies. Blocking all of them will not stop this site working. You will simply be asked the question again on your next visit, because the record of your answer is itself the cookie.

Changes

If the table above changes, this page changes first and the date at the top says when. A category will never start setting a cookie that this page has not already described.