On Gitlab jacoco maven plugin not creating report or folder - maven

Question

I have a maven build with a jacoco plugin to measure coverage. This works locally and creates the report as expected. I then wanted to pull the report into gitlab and included the file as an artifact. This never worked though and using script command to list the directory I can see the the report folder has not been created.
from the pom.xml:
<plugin>
<groupId>org.jacoco</groupId>
<artifactId>jacoco-maven-plugin</artifactId>
<version>0.8.8</version>
<configuration>
<output>file</output>
<append>true</append>
</configuration>
<executions>
<execution>
<id>jacoco-initialize</id>
<goals>
<goal>prepare-agent</goal>
</goals>
</execution>
<execution>
<id>jacoco-report</id>
<phase>test</phase>
<goals>
<goal>report</goal>
</goals>
<configuration>
<outputDirectory>./coverage-reports/jacoco-ut</outputDirectory>
</configuration>
</execution>
</executions>
</plugin>
From gitlab-ci.yml
UnitTest:
stage: test
services:
- name: postgres:latest
alias: postgres
script:
- mvn clean test -DargLine="-Dspring.datasource.url=jdbc:postgresql://postgres:5432/$POSTGRES_DB -Dspring.datasource.password=$POSTGRES_PASSWORD" -DcodegenFile="$CODEGEN_FILE"
- pwd
- ls
- cd target
- ls
- cd coverage-reports
- ls
- cd jacoco-ut
- ls
only:
- merge_requests
output from the build:
$ pwd
/builds/BJSS/Sheffield-Engineering/carbon-adjusted-workload-scheduler
$ ls
Dockerfile
README.md
checkstyle-suppressions.xml
checkstyle.xml
docker-compose.yml
docker_postgres_init.sql
documentation
hooks
maven-settings.xml
mvnw
mvnw.cmd
pom.xml
rest
src
target
$ cd target
1291$ ls
checkstyle-cachefile
checkstyle-checker.xml
checkstyle-result.xml
checkstyle-suppressions.xml
classes
generated-sources
generated-test-sources
maven-status
surefire-reports
test-classes
this works on my local computer just not on gitlab, any ideas please ?
thanks