Thank you for your response 
Hmmm that is indeed very interesting. Would you mind clarifying why it would require 20-40mA base current from the 3.3 to achieve 1 amp? Would this be to do with the DC gain of the actual transistor? Because of my uneducated mind to get 20mA lets say from a 3.3v I would just set R2 as 165 ohms.
The goal here is to do lifi with this circuit where we will be sending modulation where the 3.3v supply is (microcontroller we're using has a maximum out of 3.3v). We had success with this but we want to achieve it over a greater distance but the current is just not coming out as we are calculating. So that's our main issue right now.
1 amp is very big, but that's the high power LED were using right now where according to the datasheet the maximum current is 1.5A. My last project I was using this exact same circuit where we utilised low power LEDs. With that everything worked as calculated and I didn't even have a R2 resistor there, just PWM straight to the base of Q1 and collector of Q2. With this set up TIP31CG* it was able to reach that 135mA required fine. So just a bit puzzled here.