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Hi Andy No, it is a Webstore site.  We have no access to code or to the site folders, so we cannot do anything at all with the current .co.uk site at all, but repoint it and then 301 the pages we had.

Good points. Following on from recent developments from the Matts Cutts comments about Directories, we get loads of links which could be, might not be really from Directories.  As these are not top links we have removed some, which we can see are not related to our business at all and have removed these, but some are in that grey area, where the directory has good Trust and authority, but the links are somewhat generic. We have been working on removing links for quite a few a month or so, and we have seen our Global rank drop like a stone, as unlinking is not a good sign from where-ever, so we know this will recover. The balancing of this debate is how far you go to strip back to pure distilled links and allow a few diluted links.

I would just make sure your planning and implementation is impeccable. 1. Make sure the person doing the redirects is organized and competant, especially if you have a large number of pages. 2. Make sure that your new sitemap contains all the new URLs, so you can get any new content indexed quickly as possible. 3. Try to come up with a "newsworthy" way of stating that you have made the change. Once you have a really nice article written about the change and how it benefits your consumer base, create a high level press release through PR web or the like for distribution. 4. Resubmit the home page and all linking URLs in webmaster under "fetch as google" 5. See how you can combine tracking data from the old site into the new, so you can keep track of mon-mon and year-year progress from the transition. Thats a good place to start. Other than the basics, content and social shares are going to be what drives in new or additional traffic.

The way to solve this is actually using both Canonical and hreflang tags in all the pages that have duplicates. I remember answering a similar question that I am sure you will find it useful here: http://moz.com/community/q/custom-hreflang-tags-in-wp-using-with-yoast

Many thanks for this