We gather statistics on website visits, for example number of pages viewed and length of visits, to understand how the site is being used. This helps us to improve the information and services we offer to you online.

In the table below you can see statistics for the previous year, with two measures being shown:

• a page view is recorded each time a particular webpage is loaded from any machine by any user
• 'unique users' refers to the number of people on distinctly identifiable machines (computers) who visited the website during a month. As far as possible, repeat visits by the same machine are not counted.

Indexing agents such as search engine indexers are excluded from counts of page views and unique users.