The Scottish Business Pledge is currently undergoing a review and not accepting new members at this time

Useful info
Pledge Statistics
14/05/18

Scottish Business Pledge – Statistical Overview April 2018

Pledge Elements

As at 25 April 2018, 472 businesses had signed up to the Business Pledge – representing 0.3% of the Scotland’s registered business base. The table below shows the number and share of businesses signing up to each of the nine pledge elements.

Pledge Element Businesses % Share
Paying the living wage 472 100%
Not using exploitative zero hours contracts 472 100%
Pursuing international business opportunities 388 82.2%
Playing an active role in the community 378 80.1%
Investing in Youth 373 79.0%
Committing to an innovation program 370 78.4%
Committing to prompt payment 364 77.1%
Supporting progressive workforce engagement 331 70.1%
Making progress on diversity and gender balance 171 36.2%

As shown in the chart below, 71 businesses (15%) are already fulfilling all nine elements with the remaining 401 businesses working towards this. Note that overall 402 business (85%) are already fulfilling at least six of the nine elements.

Businesses signing up to the Pledge

To find out more about the signatory businesses, we have matched the 472 signatory businesses to the Inter-Department Business Register (IDBR). The IDBR is a database of all businesses that are VAT and/or PAYE registered. It was possible to match 425 of the 472 signatory businesses to the IDBR extract from March 2017. An IDBR match could not be found for 47 of the 472 businesses – the main reason for non-match was that the signatory business was relatively new and therefore not on the register yet.

Analysis of the 425 signatory businesses that could be matched to IDBR shows that:

The majority (66.6%) of signatory businesses were small, employing less than 50 people. However, as small firms make up 96.4% of firms within the Scottish economy, proportionately more medium and large firms had signed up to the Pledge than these firms' share of the Scottish business base.1
The signatory businesses collectively provide 97,085 jobs, 3.9% of all jobs in Scotland.
Nearly half (45.2%) of all signatory businesses operated in two broad sectors: 'Professional, scientific and technical activities' (27.3%) and 'Information and communication' (17.9%); whereas in the overall economy, these sectors make up 18.6% and 5.9% of firms respectively.
The pledge businesses have a total of 1,280 business sites (offices, shops, factories, etc) across Scotland: one third of these are situated in Glasgow City (17.6%) and City of Edinburgh (15.2%).



1Medium firms account for 15.8% of pledge signatories and large firms account for 17.6%; these firms respectively account for 2.2% and 1.4% of the Scottish business base overall.