Right! got it working, I had 2 panels, one was a container for multiple elements, one of which contained the texture, now it works as intended, but it looks rubbish because of the transparency, but thats a seperate issue

While kind of on the subject, how would you recommend going about grouping NGUI elements to make hierarchies in the project? i.e.
Anchor
|- Camera
|- Panel
|- Background
|- Texture
|- Content
|- Label
I tried using empty game objects, but that seems to mess up the transforms for subsquent children.