Councillors hope not to reveal links to secret societies

GLOUCESTERSHIRE councillors who belong to secret societies such as the freemasons will not be required to disclose their membership under current proposals.

Gloucestershire County Council is in the process of updating its code of conduct for elected members. Officers and councillors are hopeful that the new code will be adopted across all district and parish councils.

But questions have been raised about the lack of a requirement to disclose a councillor’s membership of clubs or societies.

Speaking at the constitution committee earlier this week, Councillor Jeremy Hilton (LD, Kingsholm and Wotton) said: “Why don’t we require, which we did in the past, membership of secret societies including bodies like the freemasons?

“Surely, that’s something that’s important that this council put on a register so that people are open and honest about the clubs they belong to. And the clubs that other members might belong to, or business partners the council might belong to. I’m often worried, the Localism Act 2011 did not make it a legal requirement but surely it should be a requirement of this council to have those interests recorded.”

Monitoring officer Rob Ayliffe said the technical answer is that such a disclosure is not required in law. He also questioned the practicality of enforcing such a requirement.

“There is nothing to stop people voluntarily disclosing it or in theory for the council asking for that to be included as an other interest. But the difficulty would be, how on earth do you enforce that? How would you ever know, how would it come to light? How would you deal with it, given the nature of a secret society? My concern would be a practical one, as much as anything.”

Council leader Mark Hawthorne (C, Quedgeley) said he didn’t think it has ever been a problem with Conservative councillors failing to declare they were freemasons.

He said: “My recollection of the last three masons we had on this council, [one of whom] was also a member of your group, Jeremy, I think freely disclosed that they were a member on their form. I don’t think anyone’s had a particular issue in doing that. All my members who were masons disclosed it.”

The committee voted to recommend the draft Gloucestershire code of members’ conduct for approval by county council. It will be debated at their next meeting on November 9.

A United Grand Lodge of England spokesperson said it encourages its 195,000 Freemasons to acknowledge their membership of Freemasonry.

“Freemasonry’s core values – integrity, friendship, respect and charity – are based on these four pillars and members are welcome to disclose their membership voluntarily and are obliged to disclose their membership where a specific conflict of interest could arise.

“However, it is unlawful for a council to require its councillors to declare their membership of freemasonry on the register of interests. Such a blanket requirement would breach the Human Rights Act and the Data Protection Act. Eighty per cent of Freemasons happily disclose their membership. The 20 per cent who prefer to keep it private often do so for fear of discrimination”.