Advice needed on becoming self employed please.

dug123

Hi, I am hoping that someone can help advise on my current situation. About 5 months ago my wife was diagnosed as having small cell cancer and the prognosis was 6 months left. I immediately went on the sick and have been for about 5 months and my latest sick note ends in about 2 weeks.
We have been through chemo and radiotherapy and the latest prognosis is that the cancer was not as extensive as first thought and all the treatment has worked well and my wife is now in remission. There is a 50% chance that it will return within 18 months and a 10% chance that it will never return but that is obviously all guesswork. We have 2 children, a son who is 17 and a daughter who is 11.
My employers have been superb and have stood by me through all this even though they have been struggling themselves.
I work for a small company and I work onsite at customers premises but this covers the UK from Cornwall to the Highlands. I often set off at 3.0 clock in the morning and get home at 7.0 clock at night and occasionally have to spend nights away.
We have booked a couple of holidays one at half term and one at Easter and we intend to continue spending as much time as a family together enjoying ourselves as we are allowed.
My question is would I be allowed to go self employed and work 99% of the time for just one company (my current employers)? I really want to get back to work but I want the final say in when I work and do not work and I want to be able to just go on holiday if I wish and to accompany my wife to hospital for check ups etc without having to keep asking for timeoff.
Due to the current recession my employers could not keep me working 40 hours a week they can probably only give me about 20 hours a week but I would be happy with this and it would obviously save them money. I also do a bit of other work (webdesign and hosting) but obviously very little recently.
In one respect we are lucky in that we both have cars (paid for) and we have no debts whatsoever, we have no mortgage and we never use credit cards except for booking holidays etc and we pay this back immediately. We have money in the bank and we are now getting disability living allowance and carers allowance etc and with our outgoings being minimal there is no pressure to earn a lot of money.
I would like to work because the past 6 months I have been 24 7 with my wife and I have spent most days either in hospital or reading or on my PC and I have begun to vegitate (and put on weight!).
I want to get out a bit and to work and also to give my wife the freedom and independance to go shopping with her friends and to have them around for coffee etc without me hanging around.
I am fairly sure my employers would go for this type of arrangement but I would love some advice on the practicalities.
I am sorry it is such a long post. Thank you

farmerboy

On the face of it, no, as you would only be working for 1 company if you were investigated they would say that you should be an employee. However, if you invoiced more than 1 company/person then you can be self employed.

The HMRC website has a tool for checking if you can be classed as self employed or not.

paulwf

My initial thought is it would be better for both parties to set up a flexitime arrangement. If they operate for around 40 hours a week and you only work 20 of that you will still have plenty of flexibility. You could also bank hours by working extra one week if you wanted more time off the next. I can't see the need or the justification to set up a self employed arrangement.

I would imagine the company would still want there to be some structure to your work pattern, some have core hours that you have to work and you would need to give some notice for days off.

PlutoinCapricorn

I agree that having a flexible arrangement seems your best option: I did this myself once. I got a basic salary for working a minimum of x hours per month and I filled in a timesheet each month. Anything over the minimum counted as overtime and was paid the following month as the amount was not known at the time that the payroll was run.

It seems that you have a very good employer, so it is worth trying to design a system that makes everyone happy.

If you became solely self employed, you would lose holiday pay, sick pay and the benefits that Class 1 NI payments bring.