Cookies

Cookies are small files saved on your phone, tablet or computer when you visit a website.

We use cookies to make this site work and collect information about how you use our service.

Essential cookies

We use some essential cookies to make our services work. They help us keep your information secure, and remember notifications you’ve seen so that we don’t show them to you again.

The following cookies are first-party cookies, which means they are set by Companies House:

Name	Purpose	Expires
ch_session	Session identifier for Electronic Web Filing (EWF) services. A unique random value that allows the site to identify the user’s session. Also contains a randomly generated token that changes on every page. Contains no personal information and cannot be used to identify a user.	When you close your browser
chcookie	In built Apache tracking cookie, present on Electronic Web Filing (EWF) services.	25 months
transaction	Used by Electronic Web Filing (EWF) to store the url the user will be redirected to if any session errors occur.	24 hours
lang	Remembers the language you’ve chosen.	When you close your browser or change the language manually
92a4e3521f3bb0d	Used to keep your information secure while you’re using the service.	When you sign out of the service
amlbcookie	Set to use the same web server while you’re using the service.	When you close your browser
ch_cookie_consent	Saves your email consent preferences.	After 1 year

The following cookies are essential third-party cookies, which are set by the external suppliers that provide ‘plug ins’ for some of our services:

Name	Purpose	Expires
__cfduid	The _cfduid cookie helps Cloudflare detect malicious visitors to our Customers’ websites and minimizes blocking legitimate users. It may be placed on the devices of our customers’ End Users to identify individual clients behind a shared IP address and apply security settings on a per-client basis. It is necessary for supporting Cloudflare’s security features.	30 days
__cflb	This is a load balancer cookie for sticky sessions on Cloudflare's load balancers.	24 hours

Analytics cookies

These cookies are optional. With your permission, we use them to find out how you use our services. For example, which pages you visit, how long you are on the site, how you got there and what you click on. This information helps us to improve our services.

Our cookies do not store or collect any personal information (such as your name or address), or anything that allows us to find out who you are. We use Google Analytics software (Universal Analytics) and LUX Real User Monitoring (RUM) software from SpeedCurve to collect anonymised information about how you use GOV.UK. We do this to help make sure the site is meeting the needs of its users and to help us make improvements to the site and to government digital services.

We use the following analytics cookies:

Name	Purpose	Expires
_pk_id.*	Used to improve our understanding of how people use our website and services, through web analytics.	13-25 months
_pk_ref.*	Used to improve our understanding of how people use our website and services, through web analytics.	Up to 2 years
_pk_ses.*	Used to improve our understanding of how people use our website and services, through web analytics.	30 minutes
_ga	This helps us identify how you use our website and services so we can make the site better.	2 years
_gid	Used to improve our understanding of how people use our website and services, through web analytics.	24 hours