Wow, in that case, nick1965, I appologise, yes, it is a Lazarus bug !
And a strange one at that. My suggestion is now definitely try to install Lazarus from source and see if it is still a problem. The model that Lazarus uses on Unix to allow people to use package managers to install (and therefore install in root space) but still give you, the user/programmer write access is complicated. Clever for sure but complicated things go wrong. Install from source, the linux instructions will probably be all you need.
And please let us know if that fixes the bug !
Davo