Hi Paul
It would be nice if the end users would restrict themselves to the three sections and that is certainly the way I would choose to do the numbering. However, the template is for engineering reports where the main body could be up to three hundred pages or more and is usually liberally splashed with section breaks - engineers just love section breaks: pages are often added in landscape and A3 pages added into the A4 normal pages (so you can see my predicament).
The solution in the previous post just worked (as usual, it was a lot simpler than I thought) so thank you for your help.
PS Just for interest, this page numbering procedure is part of a much larger "update all" automated procedure that updates the TOC and Tables of Figures and Tables; headers and footers; custom fields, etc...