Cookie Policy

A cookie is a small text file that a website asks your browser to store on your computer, tablet or phone. The next time you visit, your browser sends the file back, so the site can recognise something about the visit.

Cookies do different jobs. Some are essential — they remember that you have signed in, so you are not asked for your password on every page. Others are not essential: they count visitors, remember preferences, or follow people between websites to target advertising.

The rules are different for the two kinds. Non-essential cookies need your permission before they can be set. Essential ones do not. This policy explains exactly which kind this website uses, and it is deliberately specific rather than general, so you can check it against what your browser actually shows you.

We want to be plain about this, because most cookie policies are vague where they should be precise.

If you are a member of the public reading these pages, this website gives your browser no cookies. Not one. Our public pages are built to load and display published content without ever looking at, or creating, a sign-in session. The forms on this site work the same way: when you submit an enquiry, a care assessment request, a referral, a complaint or a job application, the submission is handled entirely on our server. No cookie is written for you.

This website also has a private staff area. When a member of our team signs in to manage enquiries, applications and website content, three cookies are used. Those are the only cookies this website sets, and they are all strictly necessary.

We also store nothing else in your browser. There is no data kept in local storage, session storage or an offline database, and the code sent to your browser contains nothing that reads or writes cookies.

One cookie is set when a staff member signs in, one when they ask for a password reset, and one later, when a signed-in staff member carries out a step-up-protected action such as opening an applicant's CV. None of them is created by ordinary public browsing. Their names come from the software we use — Supabase, which provides our database and our sign-in system — so the names below are the technical ones you would see in your browser's cookie panel.

The part written as <project-ref> is the identifier of our Supabase project, so the full name in your browser includes that identifier in place of the angle brackets. We do not publish that identifier here, but if you are checking this policy against what a browser shows you and you want the exact full name, ask us and we will tell you.

All of these cookies are first party. They are set by our server rather than by code running in your browser, and they are only ever sent back to this website.

The public website and the staff admin area are one application on one web address, so it is worth being precise about the difference.

The cookies above are never created by public browsing. Our server only starts or renews a sign-in session on the staff parts of the site — the admin area, the staff sign-in pages, and a small number of behind-the-scenes web addresses that only the staff area uses, such as the one that opens an applicant's CV. Everything else is served without touching the sign-in system at all.

One honest detail: those cookies apply to the whole address, not just the staff pages. So once a staff member is signed in, their browser keeps sending them while they read public pages too — that is simply how any sign-in cookie behaves. That does not create a cookie for you, and it is not used to track anyone.

We want families comparing care providers to be able to read this site without being followed around the internet afterwards. So this site carries none of the usual measurement or advertising code.

This is not just a promise in a policy. Our website's security settings — the content security policy sent with every page — allow the browser to load code from, and connect to, only this website and our own database and storage provider. Separately, our editing tools discard any script or embedded frame that anyone tries to paste into a page. Between them, a tracking tag added to this site would have nothing to load. We also switch off the browser's "topics" advertising interest feature.

Because we run no analytics, we cannot tell you how many people read a particular page from this website's own data. We accept that trade-off.

A website normally has to tell you about the cookies it uses and get your consent before setting them. That rule comes from the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003 (PECR). Regulation 6(4) sets out a narrow exemption: consent is not needed where storing or reading the information is strictly necessary to provide a service that the user has explicitly asked for.

Every cookie on this site falls inside that exemption. A staff member asking to sign in, or asking to reset their password, has explicitly requested a service that cannot work without these cookies, and the second-factor recency cookie protects the sensitive actions a signed-in staff member later requests. There is nothing else here — no measurement, no preferences, no advertising — so there is nothing for you to accept or reject.

We have deliberately not added a banner for appearance's sake. A box asking you to "accept or reject cookies" when there are no optional cookies would be misleading, and a banner that appears to control something it does not control is worse than no banner at all. We tell you instead, on this page, which is also what regulation 6 requires.

The tick box you see on our contact form, on the enquiry forms on our service and area pages, and on our referral, care assessment, complaint and job application forms is a different thing entirely. It is not a cookie control, and it is not consent in the data protection sense. It simply records that our privacy notice was shown to you at the moment you sent us your details. It has nothing to do with cookies.

Third-party cookies usually arrive through embedded content — a video player, a map, a font, a chat widget or a social feed dropped into a page. This site has none of these, and it is built so that they cannot be added by accident.

Everything our editors write goes through a filter that allows only ordinary text formatting: paragraphs, headings, lists, quotes, bold, italic and links. Embedded frames, scripts and remote images are stripped out. That means nobody updating a page can silently introduce a tracker.

Our photographs are served from our own storage provider, Supabase, which hosts this website's database and files on our behalf and only on our instructions. Loading one of those images is a plain request for a picture. It is not part of any advertising or measurement system, and it is not used to identify you or build a profile of you.

Some pages link out to other organisations — for example our Care Quality Commission profile at https://www.cqc.org.uk/location/1-340793978, or a map showing our office location. Those are ordinary links, not embeds. Nothing from those sites loads until you choose to click, and once you do, that organisation's own cookie policy applies, not ours.

You do not need to change anything to browse this site privately, because we give you no cookies to remove. If you would like to check for yourself, or manage cookies generally, every modern browser lets you see, block and delete them.

Look for the cookie or site-data settings in your browser's privacy section. You can usually view the cookies stored for a particular website, delete them, block cookies from specific sites, block third-party cookies across the board, or clear everything when you close the browser. Private or incognito windows discard cookies at the end of the session.

Blocking cookies for this website has no effect on reading the site or sending us a form — there is nothing to block.

It does have an effect on staff. If a member of our team blocks cookies for this website, they will not be able to sign in to the admin area: the sign-in will appear to succeed and then immediately return them to the login page, because there is nowhere to keep the session. The password reset link and the second-factor security check will also fail. There is no way around this, and it is not a fault — a sign-in cannot work without a sign-in cookie.

If you are a staff member having sign-in trouble, allow cookies for this website, or add it as an exception, and try again.

We may one day decide we need basic measurement — for example, to understand which service pages families find most useful. If that happens, we will ask for your consent first.

That means a clear consent request would appear before any measurement code loads; refusing would be as easy as accepting; nothing would be set if you did nothing; and you would be able to change your mind afterwards. We would not treat continued browsing as consent, and we would not set the cookies first and ask later. This page would be updated to list each new cookie, what it does and how long it lasts, before it went live.

For completeness: there is currently no analytics code, and no analytics setting, anywhere in this website. Introducing analytics would need new code and a working consent mechanism, and we would not build one without the other.

This website is written for adults. Our care service is regulated by the Care Quality Commission for Personal care for adults, and we do not provide care to children.

Because this site sets no cookies for visitors at all, it does not profile anyone, adult or child, and it does not need to guess anyone's age. Nothing here builds an advertising profile, tracks a person across websites, or uses information about a person to shape what they are shown.

We know that young people sometimes contact a care provider — a young carer looking for help for a parent, or a young person asking about a job. If you are under 18 and you are worried about someone, please ask an adult you trust to contact us with you, or call us on 0121 643 9808 so we can talk it through. If we find we are holding information about a child that we do not need, we will delete it, unless we have to keep it to protect someone's safety.

Cookies are only one part of the picture. Our Privacy Policy explains what we do with the information you send us through this website — enquiries, care assessment requests, referrals, complaints, feedback and job applications — including why we are allowed to hold it, how long we keep it, and your rights over it.

One thing worth flagging here, because people often assume it belongs in a cookie policy: when you submit a form, our security log records the internet (IP) address the submission came from, together with the time and the type of record. We do this to detect and investigate abuse of the forms, and the log also records submissions our spam checks stopped. It is recorded from the submission itself, not from a cookie. That security log is not deleted automatically at present, and our Privacy Policy explains what we hold in it and for how long.

You can read our Privacy Policy using the link in the footer of every page, or in the Related documents at the end of this page. It is also linked from the tick box on every form on this site. If you ask us for a copy of the information we hold about you, we will reply within one month.

No website is beyond the reach of a mistake or an attack, so it is fair to tell you what we would do.

If personal information we hold were lost, stolen, changed or seen by someone who should not have seen it, we would treat that as a personal data breach. Where the law requires it, we report a breach to the Information Commissioner's Office within 72 hours of becoming aware of it. Where a breach is likely to put someone at high risk, we tell the people affected without undue delay, in plain language: what happened, what we are doing about it, and what we suggest they do.

Where a breach affects a person's care, we also tell the Care Quality Commission. Our Privacy Policy sets out how we protect information and who to contact about it.

This policy describes what this website does today. We review it at least once a year, and sooner if the website changes in a way that affects cookies — for example if we add a new feature, change our sign-in provider, or introduce measurement. The date this version took effect and the date it was last reviewed are shown alongside this document.

If we make a change that affects you, we will update this page. Where the change means we need your consent for something, we will ask for it before making the change live. If you would like to see the version of this policy that applied when you contacted us, ask us and we will send it to you.

This policy is published by Premium Community Care Ltd (registered in England and Wales, company number 07697782), which trades as Premium Community Care, of 86 Digbeth, Birmingham, B5 6DY. Premium Community Care Ltd is the data controller for this website.