Thanks Robin.
I am using the free version of the plugin (which is available here https://wordpress.org/plugins/membership/, but yes, now that I have narrowed the problem down to a conflict with this plugin I will follow up with them.
Was just hoping someone here might be using the Membership2, had the same issue and had already worked out how to resolve it.
I’ve discovered it is a conflict with the Membership2 plugin (I wasn’t clearing the cache on previous plugin tests).
I would be interested to hear if anyone has been able to get bbPress working with the Membership2 plugin without this problem as they are supposed to be integrated but I can’t find any settings that might be causing this problem.