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Pledge Statistics
23/02/17

Scottish Business Pledge - Statistical Overview February 2017

Pledge Elements

As at 15 February 2017, 334 businesses had signed up to the Business Pledge – representing 0.2% 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 334 100%
Not using exploitative zero hours contracts 334 100%
Pursuing international business opportunities 269 81%
Playing an active role in the community 224 77%
Investing in Youth 257 75%
Committing to an innovation program 247 74%
Committing to prompt payment 235 70%
Supporting progressive workforce engagement 208 62%
Making progress on diversity and gender balance 114 34%

Chart 1 below shows that 38 businesses are already fulfilling all nine elements and that 267 businesses (80%) 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 334 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 297 of the 334 signatory businesses to the IDBR extract from March 2016. An IDBR match could not be found for 37 of the 334 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 297 signatory businesses that could be matched to IDBR shows that:

The majority (65%) of signatory businesses were small, employing less than 50 people. However, as small firms make up 96 per cent 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 83,460 Scottish jobs, 3.4% of all jobs.
Nearly half (45%) of all signatory businesses operated in two broad sectors: 'information and communication' (19%) and 'professional, scientific and technical activities' (26%). In the overall economy, these sectors make up 6% and 19% of firms respectively. This may be linked to the fact that higher quality working conditions already exist in these sectors (e.g. better pay), making it easier to make the pledge.
The pledge businesses have a total of 1,090 business sites (offices, shops, factories, etc) across Scotland.


1Medium firms account for 16% of pledge signatories and large firms 19%; these firms respectively account for 2% and 1% of the Scottish business base overall.