Update.
After a lot of research on scrap miggies at my local breakers I found that to remove the offending aircon pipe i would have to lift the mount for the ABS unit - looks like a pig of a job. Even after doing this getting the pipe off would be almost impossible as both ends have lots of bends making it a nightmare to get them through cluttered small openings.
I came away from the breakers with both ends of the pipe but with the middle flexy part cut through, my plan is to buy some hydraulic flexy pipe and slide it into position from one end before fixing it to one of the metal ends with two jubilee clips, the other metal end will already be fixed on.
Having cut the original pipe, which I suspected of leaking, and removed it I was dismayed to see that it looked leak free. However on looking closer I found a couple of pinholes at one of the bends, these had not been caused by rubbing as first thought but looked more like poor quality alloy that had deteriorated over the years.
I will let you know if my fix works.
