My asr and abs lights have decided to come on and stay on on my 02 vrs, pressing the asr button makes no difference, any ideas?

I would imagine you have a faulty ABS sensor, therefore the lights have come on to tell you both ASR and ABS systems are currently disabled on your car.

Get it scanned for faults and I suspect you will see an ABS failure on one (or more) of the corners.

MAF sensor. Same happened on mine. Replaced it and all was fine.

When plugged into VAG com it registered as an ABS error tho?