Catfish fails to update database

I have just tried Catfish for local files search. I am using it (at time of writing version 1.2.2) with Debian Jessie  and Xfce desktop.
Every time I opened catfish I was prompted to update the database as it was never updated. I was updating this with administrative rights, but after closing and opening the application the same message was displayed.

From the message prompt catfish looks for the database in /var/lib/locate.findutils/locate.findutils.db.
The catfish utility is based on locate and find and the locate database is updated by the updatedb command.
The man page of updatedb for my debian system says:

       --output=dbfile
              The  database  file  to  build.  Default is system-dependent.  In Debian GNU/Linux, the default is /var/cache/locate/locatedb.