Cookie policy

We use cookies and similar tools across this website to improve its performance and enhance your user experience. This policy explains how we do that.

What are cookies?

Cookies are small text files which a website may put on your computer or mobile device when you first visit a site or page. The cookie will help the website, or another website, to recognise your device the next time you visit. Web beacons or other similar files can also do the same thing. We use the term “cookies” in this policy to refer to all files that collect information in this way.

There are many functions cookies serve. For example, they can help us to remember your username and preferences, analyse how well our website is performing or even allow us to recommend content we believe will be most relevant to you.

Certain cookies contain personal information – for example, if you click “remember me” when logging in, a cookie will store your username. Most cookies won’t collect information that identifies you, and will instead collect more general information such as how users arrive at and use our websites, or a user’s general location.

What sort of cookies do BST use?

Generally, our cookies perform up to three different functions:

1.  Essential cookies

Some cookies are essential for the operation of our website. For example, some cookies allow us to identify authenticated users to ensure they can access the member’s only pages. If a member opts to disable these cookies, they will not be able to access all of the content that is entitled them to.

2.  Performance Cookies

We utilise other cookies to analyse how our visitors use our websites and to monitor website performance. This allows us to provide a high quality experience by customising our offering and quickly identifying and fixing any issues that arise. For example, we might use performance cookies to keep track of which pages are most popular, which method of linking between pages is most effective, and to determine why some pages are receiving error messages..

3.  Functionality Cookies

We use functionality cookies to allow us to remember your preferences. For example, cookies save you the trouble of typing in your username every time you access the site, and recall your customisation preferences, such as font-sizes.

Does anyone else use cookies on this website?

We also use or allow third parties to serve cookies that fall into the three categories above. For example, like many companies, we use Google Analytics to help us monitor our website traffic. We may also use third party cookies to help us with market research, revenue tracking and improving site functionality.

Can a website user block cookies?

As we’ve explained above, cookies help you to get the most out of our websites.

The first time you accessed our website after 22 May 2012, you should have seen an overlay which explained that by continuing to access our site, you are consenting to our use of cookies.

However, if you do wish to disable our cookies then please follow the instructions below for a main selection of browsers.  The instructions detailed below were correct at time of writing.

Please remember that if you do choose to disable cookies, you may find that certain sections of our website do not work properly.

Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10

• Open Internet Explorer, click on tools and then choose Internet Options.
• Select the Privacy tab and then click the ‘Advanced’ button.
• Check the ‘Override automatic cookie handling’ checkbox, select your custom options, click Ok and then Ok again.

Google Chrome

• Open Google Chrome, click on the spanner icon (settings) in the top right of the page and click the ‘Show advanced settings’ link at the bottom of the page.
• Under Privacy, click on ‘Content settings...’ and under Cookies, select your preferences and then press Ok.
• The close the settings page, simply close the tab it was opened in.

Firefox

• Open Firefox, click on the orange Firefox button in the top left of the page, select options and then select options.
• Select the ‘Privacy’ tab and then select ‘Use custom settings for history’.  This will reveal further options.
• Select your custom cookie options starting from ‘Accept cookies from sites’ and below and then click Ok.

Other browsers

If your browser is not listed above, perform a Google search for cookie settings for your browser to find to relevant information.

More Information

More detail on how businesses use cookies is available at www.allaboutcookies.org.