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thick red wire reads around the 12v mark when engine off.
brown/red has no volts when ignition off but around 10v when on.

I know the stereo works fine as I've tried it numerous times in my mates ford.

Am I the only person who has this issue??? Am I that lucky???!!!!!!

slowly starting to dislike the polo now......................

Thats correct

I have never seen this issue before. The fact you have the correct voltages suggests a problem with the headunit

Have you another non factory head unit you can try in there?

well the hu I'm trying at the moment is a kenwood and I have a brand new pioneer waiting to go in but that gets no power that I can see and that doesn't turn on either.
I'm more inclined to think there's a fault with the car but the car is totally standard apart from led sidelight bulbs (which are a direct swap) and I can't see anything which has been changed or interfered with (oooerr missus!!).

Have you checked the earth (brown) is ok?

Final thing to try could be this...

Tag the ignition live from the headunit to the permanent power feed and see if it comes to life

I assume you are turning the ignition on, and back to ignition off but not removing the key so the ACC electrics stay working?

I've been trying the key every way! key out/key in but not turned/key in turned one position/key in turned two positions/and finally car started and running.

Surely if the earth was faulty then no power would get to it so the standby light would not illuminate? and affect other items in the car?

I've not tried yellow and red together as I want it wired properly but I will try it to see what happens.

Seriously thinking about wiring it up separately ie new wires not including vw loom (well only for speakers) so if you could point me to a nearby switched live I can use that and then run the other wires to the battery using inline fuses.

can any one help??????????

I think you need to try red and yellow together and go from there

all thats going to do is show me it works and I know it works already.Is there any other fuses associated with the stereo that I can check? As I said before I want this wired in properly and don't want to bodge (no offence intended) wire it in.

No - thats going to prove if theres enough power on the permanent live to feed the ignition live too (which there should be)

Im not suggesting you bodge it at all - its merely testing.

What I am saying is try this, and if that works, it points to the below possible problems.

Either -

The ignition switch is faulty and not providing an appropriate ignition live
You have another blown fuse - check the fuse for the electric windows, the central locking and the cigar lighter
There is a wiring fault though I deem this very unlikely.

The fact you only get 10V on the brown/red wire is slightly concerning

I would be inclined to check every fuse to make sure its ok in any case.

Ah I get what you mean now
My windows still work,never ever tried the cigarette lighter! Does the cigarette lighter use a switched live I can use as I never use the lighter anyway so I could remove it totally and use those wires?

Cigarette lighter on these is a permanent live, but the fuse is shared

This points to a larger problem if the ignition live is not working to the radio

You could probably take a feed from the heated rear window switch - its only a trigger wire, so doesnt pull much power at all.

If the ignition switch is at fault what else could it affect? As far as I'm aware everything else works on the car just not the stereo.

Without looking at the wiring diagram I couldnt say, but theres a handful of other things as well as the radio controlled by it.