About cookies

Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer by the websites you visit. Cookies allow us to identify you (or, more accurately, your computer) when you visit our website. Knowing how often people are visiting each page of our website helps us work out how and where to improve our website.

Our website uses a mix of necessary and non-essential (performance and marketing) cookies. While the essential cookies are needed to make the site function properly, you can set your preferences for the non-essential cookies by using our cookie preferences tool. This will appear automatically the first time you visit our site or if you open up our site in a private web browser. You can also find it at any point by clicking the icon in the bottom left of the screen.

This cookie policy is part of our Privacy Policy.

Types of cookie

There are different categories of cookies:

Necessary cookies help make our website usable by enabling basic functions like page navigation and access to secure areas of the website. The website cannot function properly without these cookies and you cannot disable these cookies through the preference settings on our site. You can disable these by changing your browser settings, though this will result in some parts of our website not working.

Functional cookies enable us to enhance the functionality of our website, for example by providing you with a more personalised experience based on previous preferences you may have selected or your previous visits. You can disable these cookies through the preference settings on our site or your browser settings however this may result in some parts of the website not working properly.

Performance or analytics cookies help us understand how visitors interact with our websites by collecting and reporting information anonymously. They help us to improve the performance of our website. These cookies will not be enabled unless you have consented to this.

Marketing cookies are used to track visitors across websites. The intention is to display content and ads that are relevant and engaging for the individual user and therefore more valuable. These cookies will not be enabled unless you have consented to this.

Persistent cookies and session cookies

Persistent cookies remain on a visitor’s device for a set amount of time. This means for example that we can identify when a site visitor is a repeat visitor or new to us.

Session cookies are created temporarily and last for as long as your browser window is open, being automatically deleted after you close your browser. These allow us to link the actions of a user during a visit to the website, to provide a consistent experience.

First party cookies and third-party cookies

First-party cookies are set directly by our website.

Third-party cookies are set by another website, usually because we have incorporated elements from those other sites into our site (for example videos or social media plugins).

The cookies we use

Details about the cookies we use are set out below. Some of these are third-party cookies.

nesta-about-cookie First-time visitors to our website will see a small box with information about Nesta. This cookie is used to remember when you have dismissed the information box. It expires in 1 year.

nesta-cookie This cookie is used to remember your acceptance of the use of cookies on our website. It expires in 1 year.

_gat_UA-1360665-8 This cookie enables Google Analytics on our website. It expires in 1 minute.

_hjIncludedInSample This session cookie is set to let Hotjar know whether a visitor is included in the sample which is used to generate Heatmaps and other performance information to help us improve our website.

_ga This is a Google Analytics cookie. It helps us monitor the use and performance of our website. It expires in 2 years.

_gid This is a Google Analytics cookie. It helps us monitor the use and performance of our website. It expires in 24 hours.

__cfduid Used by Cloudflare to identify individual clients behind a shared IP address and apply security settings on a per-client basis. It expires in 1 year.

Third party cookies

This website uses cookies provided by other organisations to support functions such as statistical performance analysis, rich media functionality and social sharing. These are third party cookies. You can read privacy policies from these third parties below:

Control your cookie settings

If you want, you can block cookies by changing the settings on your browser – we have set out below links to the help pages of some major browsers which explain how you can do this. Blocking the cookies we use may have an adverse impact on the presentation of some or all of our website. General guidance on how to manage your cookies can be found here:

Your Online Choices

Specific guidance on how to manage cookie options for common website browsers can be found here: