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Cookie Policy

What cookies and similar technologies this website uses, what they do, and how you can control them.

Last updated29 July 2026

Version1.0

Tracking cookiesNone

Consent bannerNot required

The short version This website does not track you. There are no analytics cookies, no advertising or remarketing pixels, no social media trackers and no third-party embeds. The only cookies set are the ones WordPress needs in order to work, and most of those only appear if you sign in as a member of staff. That is why you are not being asked to accept anything.

1. What cookies are

Cookies are small text files placed on your device when you visit a website. They are used for things like keeping you signed in, remembering a preference, and making sure a form submission reaches the right place. Similar technologies — such as local storage and session storage — do comparable jobs without being cookies in the strict sense.

Not all of them are used for tracking. The distinction that matters in law is whether a cookie is strictly necessary for the service you asked for, or whether it does something extra, like measuring your behaviour or building an advertising profile. The first kind does not need your permission. The second kind does.

You are not seeing a consent banner because this website does not set anything that requires consent.

Specifically, it uses:

no analytics or statistics tools;
no advertising, remarketing or conversion pixels;
no social media buttons, feeds or share widgets;
no session recording, heatmapping or scroll tracking;
no embedded maps, videos, chat widgets or review widgets;
no external fonts or icon libraries loaded from another company's servers;
no cross-site identifiers of any kind.

Rather than show you a banner and then set trackers anyway, we have built the site so there is nothing to ask about. If that changes, a banner will appear and this page will be updated before anything new is set.

3. Cookie categories

Strictly necessary — in use

Needed for the website to function: keeping a signed-in member of staff authenticated, and confirming your browser accepts cookies at all. These cannot be switched off, because the site would not work correctly without them, and they do not require consent.

Analytics and performance — not in use

We do not measure how the site is used. We are aware that means we have less insight into where the accident report form causes difficulty, and we would rather find that out by asking customers than by tracking them.

Preference and functionality — not in use

We do not store site preferences in cookies. The one thing we do remember — a partly completed accident report — uses browser session storage on your own device and is described in section 5.

Marketing — not in use

No advertising or marketing cookies are set on this website, and we do not share data with advertising networks.

4. What this website sets

The table below lists everything set by this website and the software that runs it.

Cookies and storage used on sterlingaccident.co.uk.
Name	Set by	Category	Purpose	Expires
wordpress_test_cookie	WordPress	Strictly necessary	Checks whether your browser accepts cookies before showing a sign-in form.	End of browser session
wordpress_[hash]	WordPress	Strictly necessary	Authenticates a signed-in member of staff in the administration area. Not set for ordinary visitors.	End of browser session
wordpress_logged_in_[hash]	WordPress	Strictly necessary	Keeps a member of staff signed in across pages. Not set for ordinary visitors.	Up to 14 days
wp-settings-[id] and wp-settings-time-[id]	WordPress	Strictly necessary	Remembers a staff member's administration screen preferences. Not set for ordinary visitors.	1 year
elementor	Elementor	Strictly necessary	Used by the page editor while a staff member is building a page. Not set for ordinary visitors.	End of browser session
sa-draft:claim, sa-draft:contact, sa-draft:garage-quick, sa-draft:garage-full	Sterling Accident	Strictly necessary — session storage, not a cookie	Temporarily keeps what you have typed into a form so it is not lost if the page reloads. Stays on your device and is never sent to us. Never includes photographs, and never includes consent tick-boxes.	End of browser tab session

Scroll the table sideways to see all columns.

If you never sign in to the website — which is true of every customer and every garage partner using the public pages — the only entry above that affects you is the accident report draft, and that never leaves your own browser.

Our hosting provider may also use a technical cookie to serve the correct cached version of a page. Where that happens it is strictly necessary for delivering the website, contains no information about you, and is not used for any other purpose.

5. Browser storage and your form draft

One piece of this deserves explaining properly, because it is the only thing we store about what you do.

The accident report form has five steps. People get interrupted halfway through — a call, a tow truck arriving, a phone running out of battery. So as you type, the form saves your answers into your browser's own session storage. If the page reloads, your answers come back and you carry on.

How it works in practice:

The data stays on your device. It is never transmitted to us until you press the button to send your report.
Photographs are never saved this way.
Consent tick-boxes are never restored, so consent is always given deliberately.
It clears when you close the browser tab, and it clears as soon as your report is sent successfully.
There is a "start again with a blank form" button on the form if you want to clear it immediately.

If you would rather nothing were stored at all, use a private browsing window, or block storage for this site in your browser settings. The form still works — you would just lose your answers if the page reloaded.

6. Third-party content

There is none. This website loads no scripts, fonts, icons, images, maps, videos or widgets from any other company's servers. Everything it needs is served from sterlingaccident.co.uk.

That is a deliberate choice. Every external resource on a page is another organisation able to see who visited, and on a website where people report road accidents that seemed like a poor trade for a slightly nicer font.

7. Managing cookies in your browser

You can control cookies through your browser settings, including blocking them or deleting existing ones. Blocking strictly necessary cookies may stop parts of the site working properly.

Controls are usually found under Settings, then Privacy — the exact route differs between Chrome, Edge, Safari and Firefox, and between desktop and mobile. Your browser's own help pages will have the current instructions.

Because we set no tracking cookies, there is nothing here for you to opt out of, and turning on "do not track" or a tracker blocker will not change how this site behaves.

8. How we keep this page accurate

A cookie policy is only useful if it reflects reality. We re-check what the live site sets whenever we add or change a plugin, an integration or a tool, and we update this page and the date at the top when anything changes.

If you check for yourself and find something set that is not listed here, please tell us — email claim@sterlingaccident.co.uk. We would rather correct this page than have it be wrong.

9. Contact

Questions about this policy? Email claim@sterlingaccident.co.uk. Our Privacy Policy covers personal information more broadly, including what the forms collect and how long we keep it.