This BBC article covers people on the government's welfare-to-work scheme being inappropriately pushed towards self-employment, which is not something that would suit everyone. Clients of six different Work Programme providers said that they were encouraged to pretend to be working for themselves or set up businesses they did not consider viable and invent their 16 hours a week to get tax credit, so the programme providers got their payments "by results" for getting the clients off Jobseekers.
From a personal point of view self-employment would not be for me. I often had well meaning friends ask if I'd considered it, admittedly they had not known I had Aspergers when they said this. I'd said no, as I'd known that selling a product on a self-employed basis is similarly difficult to selling oneself in a conventional job interview, not to mention the dealings with bank managers, solicitors and auditors. There was an interesting topic on an Aspergers forum, where a social enterprise set-up was being founded with the principle that it would be a business network made up of ASpies who make and produce the goods, and non-ASpies who market, sell, and handle the customer-care side. The posters of this were parents setting their sons up, I think that idea could work in principle.
