In 2012, we offered short time to our employees due to a lack of business. John took 8 weeks off unpaid to work for himself with our agreement.

At the beginning of 2013, we did the same and John said he would like to take time off again. He has not been back since and has been working as self employed.

This has been a mutual agreement and really we don’t want him back as we have no work. We know he wants redundancy but he has been with the Firm 20 years and we are a very small business and this would break us at a time when business is so slow.

Is there any other way around making him redundant? We did think about asking him to come back to work in the hope he has too much work on himself but this is clearly a gamble!

Any ideas/advice would be very welcome