Thank you to everyone for very helpful replies. I've been a bit depressed about this and could not summon the enthusiasm to reply up to now.

To answer a couple of Andy's questions - I am an IEng and, although there might well be Quality Management opportunities I think I would find that terribly tedious compared with engineering so would like to avoid if possible.

A frustration is that I cannot kick into action with many of the suggestions in this thread. We were supposed to get redundancy letters on the 14th, but the owners wife said she would leave it another week in case anything turns up. Since there are less than 20 employees it seems there is no legal process to follow.  We did try and see if the staff could take on the running of the business instead of closing it, but a £1M purchase price is now being quoted!

All we can do is wait and see!

Thank you to everyone for very helpful replies. I've been a bit depressed about this and could not summon the enthusiasm to reply up to now.

To answer a couple of Andy's questions - I am an IEng and, although there might well be Quality Management opportunities I think I would find that terribly tedious compared with engineering so would like to avoid if possible.

A frustration is that I cannot kick into action with many of the suggestions in this thread. We were supposed to get redundancy letters on the 14th, but the owners wife said she would leave it another week in case anything turns up. Since there are less than 20 employees it seems there is no legal process to follow.  We did try and see if the staff could take on the running of the business instead of closing it, but a £1M purchase price is now being quoted!

All we can do is wait and see!