Well further to this I can actually die and dump the dat afrom within the env.local.php file so its actually loading this file, its somehow not then picking up the local/connections array values.

So this fails:

  'host'      => getenv('DB_HOST'),
    'database'  => getenv('DB_NAME'),
    'username'  => getenv('DB_USER'),
    'password'  => getenv('DB_PASSWORD'),

and if hardcoded it works:

   'host'      =>'localhost,
    'database'  =>'homestead',
    'username'  => 'homestead',
    'password'  =>'secret',

So any ideas why this is seems so and that the 'getenv('DB_HOST') etc ' is not being picked up?