Labor taxes could sink family businesses like mine, says Lance Forman

The extraordinary Lance Forman is a consummate artist as he shows me around his East End salmon smoking factory. As we don overalls, rubber gloves and hair nets, he jokingly points out two large fish drying facilities manufactured by the German company Reich.

“If I had bought another one, it would be the Third Reich,” the 62-year-old jokes with his characteristic avant-garde humor.

His business, H Forman and Son, has been in London Docklands since 1905, and his clients include Fortnum & Mason, Harrods, Ivy and Orient Express. Mark Hix, chef at Caprice restaurant group, said the fish was the best in the business and he wouldn’t buy it from anyone else. It is a staple on many Christmas tables.

Forman is passionate about the family business and tells me his story as we tour the factory, weaving among women and men holding very sharp knives.

The walls are filled with photographs of the East End from the early 20th century, when the Docklands saw a wave of Jewish immigrants, many of whom escaped Tsarist Russia and later Germany. His great-grandfather, Aaron ‘Harry’ Forman and his brother Louis were part of that journey, having fled the pogroms in Odessa before founding the company that would last more than a century. Business is in Lance’s blood.

“I remember my dad staying with me on the weekends,” he says. “He taught me how to carve smoked salmon when I was six.”

The smell of fresh fish is penetrating and immediately awakens the senses. The temperature inside the factory is close to zero degrees and the entrails are scattered on the floor.

It’s a lively place with local as well as Eastern European workers: Cockneys and Poles shouting at each other as the fish is cut, smoked, dried and packaged for the elegant customers.

The salmon comes from Scotland and is salted and air-dried to give it its delicate, smoky texture.

Each worker has a role and the work is hard, efficient and fast.

“Salmon became a gourmet food in this country in the early 20th century because of the way people like my grandfather smoked it,” he says. «The London cure is something that the Eastern European Jews who settled in the East End brought with them. Smoking fish was something they knew.”

Christmas is Forman’s busiest time of year and it is crucial that it hits its sales targets over the next few weeks – half of its annual online turnover is made during this period. Wholesale Christmas sales are double those of a typical month.

I ask him what kind of income he makes during the period.

‘How much money do you have in your bank account?’ he answers. “We don’t make the numbers public, but the business is not as big as you think.”

That may be so, but the factory is big: thousands of square feet on both sides of the bank on Fish Island, near the Olympic stadium. The company employs 60 people.

The original factory burned down in 1998 and the company had to move in 2007 after the former site was developed for the 2012 Olympics.

‘You learn how to deal with it. I always tell business students to have a plan, but to be flexible in the face of unexpected events,” he says.

He is no fan of the Labor government or chancellor Rachel Reeves, and believes Keir Starmer and his cohorts are off to a terrible start. He says: ‘People expected them to be different, but they have no idea. It has fallen apart quickly and completely.’

She genuinely fears businesses like hers will have to close after the Chancellor’s Budget two months ago left UK plc discouraged about the future.

He says farmers are hitting the headlines at the moment because of Jeremy Clarkson and his tractors rolling around London. However, he says the biggest threat is family businesses like his.

Business relief, which was introduced by a Labor government almost 50 years ago, allows company shareholders to leave business assets to their loved ones without paying inheritance tax.

But, in a radical change that will come into force in April 2026, full business relief will only apply to the first £1 million of a company’s assets following the death of a shareholder, with anything over this figure subject to a 20 percent tax. The relief is crucial, especially for businesses that already have large overhead costs.

Forman’s has an electricity bill of £400,000 a year, down from £100,000 before the war between Russia and Ukraine began.

“I feel threatened by this,” he says of Labour’s changes. “The number one reason family businesses decide to give up on everything is because the owners decide they don’t need that hassle anymore.”

For now, none of his three children seem to want to take over the company: one works in the media, the other is a rabbi and his daughter is an actress. He says, ‘Who knows? Maybe, like salmon, they will return.

He built a career himself before taking over the family business, training as an accountant at PwC after Cambridge University. His first job was to assess the Polish automobile industry. He says: ‘It was the first privatization in all of Eastern Europe. I was the first accountant to translate Polish accounts into an international format. That’s my claim to fame.

After that he had a brief spell in 1991 as special adviser to Business Secretary Peter Lilley.

His great hatred in addition to increasing taxes is bureaucracy. His blood boils as he tells me about the obstacles he has to overcome to run his salmon empire from the East End.

‘We had a client who came to us and said, ‘Can we see your floor cleaning schedules?’

Forman responded: “We don’t have schedules.” Then he asked, ‘How do we know you cleaned the floor?’

“Well, look at the ground,” Forman told him. ‘We wonder why our productivity is out the window. It’s because we’re doing all these things that don’t add any value.’

He firmly believes that if Britain were freed from endless regulation, the country would be more productive and businesses could save on labor costs.

He lives in north London with his wife René Anisfeld and tells me that two years ago he was banned from driving. He now goes to work on public transport even though his ban has ended.

“I was banned because I was often going 23 mph in a 20 mph zone. Driving in London now is absolutely miserable.’

He describes as “interesting” the appointment of Elon Musk as a guru in the fight against bureaucracy in the United States.

Hatred of bureaucracy helps explain his pro-Brexit views and very public backing of the Reform Party and Nigel Farage, although he has some harsh words for the now Clacton MP.

‘Farage is not a team player. Throughout his story he wants to incorporate people, but when they do he feels threatened by them. And it never works. “It’s a big deal for him and for Reform UK.”

And with that, he sets out again on his mission of doing business, one smoked salmon at a time.