pgAgent not working on linux (Ubuntu 14.04)

I am running Postgres 9.3 on Ubuntu 14.04 and I am unable to get pgAgent daemon/service to run. I have confirmed that the daemon is not running using service --status-all. When trying to run pgagent (whilst logged in as the only user in ubuntu) using pgagent hostaddr=127.0.0.1 dbname=postgres user=user1 the following messages are displayed: WARNING: Couldn't create the primary connection (attempt 10): fe_sendauth: no password supplied ERROR: Stopping pgAgent: Couldn't establish the primary connection with the database server. The lack of running pgAgent was also confirmed when trying to run a job on demand. The user 'user1' is able to log into pgAgmin and connect to the database from other computers on the local network. The user looks like this in the pg_hba.conf file: # Database administrative login by Unix domain socket local all user1 md5 A .pgpass password file also exists for this user in the home directory. What is causing the above messages and what needs to be done to get pgAgent to run scheduled tasks?