About cookies
We put small files (known as ‘cookies’) onto your computer to collect information about how you browse the site.
Cookies are used to:
- remember your progress
- measure how you use the website so it can be updated and improved based on your needs
Cookies aren’t used to identify you personally.
You’ll normally see a message on the site before we store a cookie on your computer.
Find out more about how to manage cookies.
How we use cookies
You may see a pop-up welcome message when you first visit https://www.prisonandprobationjobs.gov.uk/. We’ll store a cookie so that your computer knows you’ve seen it and knows not to show it again.
| Name | Purpose | Expires |
|---|---|---|
| seen_cookie_message | Saves a message to let us know that you’ve seen our cookie message | 1 month |
Remembering your progress
We will store a cookie to remember your progress in this computer.
| Name | Purpose | Expires |
|---|---|---|
| _session | Tracks your progress on the website and saves any job search location | When you close your browser |
Measuring website usage (Google Analytics)
We use Google Analytics software to collect information about how you use the website. We do this to help make sure the site is meeting the needs of its users and to help us make improvements.
Google Analytics stores information about:
- the pages you visit
- how long you spend on each page
- how you got to the site
- what you click on while you’re visiting the site
We don’t collect or store personal information so this information can’t be used to identify who you are.
We don’t allow Google to use or share our analytics data.
Google Analytics sets the following cookies:
Universal Analytics
| Name | Purpose | Expires |
|---|---|---|
| _ga | This helps us count how many people visit the site by tracking if you’ve visited before | 2 years |
| _gid | This helps us count how many people visit by tracking if you’ve visited before | 24 hours |
| _gat | Used to manage the rate at which page view requests are made | 10 minutes |
Google Analytics
| Name | Purpose | Expires |
|---|---|---|
| _utma | Like _ga, this lets us know if you’ve visited before, so we can count how many of our visitors are new to the site or to a certain page | 2 years |
| _utmb | This works with _utmc to calculate the average length of time you spend on the site | 30 minutes |
| _utmc | This works with _utmb to calculate when you close your browser | when you close your browser |
| _utmz | This tells us how you reached the website (for example from another website or a search engine) | 6 months |
Advertising
We use cookies to make our advertising more engaging and relevant to users. We use cookie information to focus our advertising on what’s relevant to specific users, to improve performance reporting, and to avoid showing ads that the user has already seen.
For example, we use cookies to remember your most recent searches, your previous interactions with our ads or search results, and your visits to our website.
We may also use data from conversion cookies to determine how many people who click on our ads go on to view and apply for prison and probation jobs. Conversion cookies are not used by Google for interest-based ad targeting and persist for a limited time only.