Analytics are necessary - without analytics sites' design would be much worse.
They don't meet the legal definition of strictly necessary.
They don't really "track you" in any meaningful way - the most interesting info in the gov.uk cookies seems to be language (English or Welsh) and if the user provides it, country (England, Wales, Scotland or NI).
Still, the data falls under GDPR, so we get consent dialogs.
the ones you mention would fall into “essential use”, since its first party and is used for functionality on the site.
what you didnt mention is that:
> We also use LUX Real User Monitoring software cookies from SpeedCurve to measure your web performance experience while visiting GOV.UK.
stuff like this is why they need the consent dialog.
if instead of embedding tracing cookies and analytics JS they processed access logs, they would learn a lot without needing the dialog. However, since everyone just throws up the dialog (and users are trained to expect it) its “not worth solving”.
They don't meet the legal definition of strictly necessary.
They don't really "track you" in any meaningful way - the most interesting info in the gov.uk cookies seems to be language (English or Welsh) and if the user provides it, country (England, Wales, Scotland or NI).
Still, the data falls under GDPR, so we get consent dialogs.
https://www.gov.uk/help/cookie-details