After endless messing around with config files here is the simple solution though why it worked I have no idea!
All I did was change the installation folder name from
/dokuwiki/
to anything - I changed it from dokuwiki to dokuwiki2 and suddenly my localhost version loaded. Does anyone have any idea what happened?
I would rather keep the same folder name as my online site because then I don;t have to mess around with different path names for example in my template the header contains a path to dokuwiki which I had to change to dokuwiki2 to get it working.