CAN you keep a secret? If so, you may be in the wrong job, for public service is predicated on the notions of openness and transparency.

Or is it? According to The Times Higher Education Supplement (July 13), the Freemasons, seen by some as a sort of semi-secret cult, are “alive and recruiting in academia”. Freemasonry is flourishing in universities with more “traditional cultures”, it says.

June Purvis, a professor of women’s and gender history, is appalled, not least because the masons are “overwhelmingly an organisation of white men”.

A tutor at Durham University disagrees, saying that before he joined them he assumed the Freemasons were an “upper-class networking group with a secret quality”. In fact, they are not like that all, the tutor says, although oddly he refuses to be identified.

Transparency – or the apparent lack of it – is also an issue in the health service, specifically in the NHS Supply Chain, which provides the goods needed to deliver health-care. Health Service Journal (July 12) reports on concerns among MPs that the names of clinicians who sit on the Supply Chain’s new-product councils will not routinely be published. The way clinicians are chosen does not seem to be “a healthy, open or transparent process”, says one MP. But a spokeswoman for the procurement body defends the decision: “Many clinicians will not want it to be known that they take part [in the councils].”

Health ministers also stand accused of being less than open about the results of a huge “patient experience” survey. Pulse (July 12) says that GPs are angry because the Government appears to be dragging its heels over publishing the survey results.

The findings are believed to show GPs in a good light but also reveal wide variation in satisfaction levels about access to surgeries. No conspiracy, says the Health Secretary, Alan Johnson. The results will be published soon.

No chance of any secrets in the new “superdense” residential developments that are coming to Britain’s big cities. Building (July 13) says that a “Hong Kong-style” superdense scheme planned for London will have 2,500 homes per hectare. A report by a team of architects says that building at such density leads to pressure on shared space and tensions between neighbours. The director of Design for Living, an advisory body, notes that the new schemes “look surprisingly like the stuff that we are pulling down”.

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