When we provide services, we want to make them easy, useful and reliable. Where services are delivered on the internet, this sometimes involves placing small amounts of information on your device, for example, computer or mobile phone. These include small files known as cookies. They cannot be used to identify you personally.

What are cookies?

These pieces of information are used to improve services for you through, for example:

• enabling a service to recognise your device so you don’t have to give the same information several times during one task

• recognising that you may already have given a username and password so you don’t need to do it for every web page requested

• measuring how many people are using services, so they can be made easier to use and there’s enough capacity to ensure they are fast.

• analysing anonymised data to help us understand how people interact with government services so we can make them better.

You can manage these small files and learn more about them from the article, Internet Browser cookies – what they are and how to manage them from Gov.uk: How government websites use cookies. If you’d like to learn how to remove cookies set on your device, visit: About cookies: How to control cookies.

Using cookies to measure website performance

By understanding how people use the Parliament website, we can make improvements to the navigation and content to make the site better and easier to access.

We use Google Analytics to gather data on the number of people accessing our site, where they are accessing from, what pages they visit, and what technology they are using.

Google Analytics cannot identify your personally, but does allow us to understand our users as a group, for example by recording what browsers are being used.