The Scottish Business Pledge is currently undergoing a review and not accepting new members at this time
The Scottish Business Pledge is a shared mission between the Scottish Government and businesses, with the goal of boosting productivity, competitiveness, employment, fair work and workforce engagement and development. By making their Pledge companies demonstrate their commitment to shared values and to deliver them through their actions and future plans.
The Pledge has nine elements:
As at 11 January 2016, 184 businesses had signed up to the Business Pledge. Detail on the individual pledge elements is available for these businesses. The table below shows the number and share of businesses signing up to each of the nine elements.
Pledge Element | Businesses | % Share |
Paying the living wage | 184 | 100% |
Not using exploitative zero hours contracts | 184 | 100% |
Pursuing international business opportunities | 148 | 80% |
Committing to prompt payment | 135 | 73% |
Playing an active role in the community | 129 | 70% |
Investing in Youth | 129 | 70% |
Committing to an innovation program | 126 | 68% |
Supporting progressive workforce engagement | 119 | 65% |
Making progress on diversity and gender balance | 75 | 41% |
Chart 1 below shows that 24 businesses are already fulfilling all nine elements and that 144 businesses (78%) are already fulfilling at least six of the nine elements.
To find out more about the pledge businesses, we have matched the 184 pledge businesses to the Inter-Departmental Business Register (IDBR). The IDBR is a database of all businesses that are VAT and/or PAYE registered. The IDBR holds information on the activity, ownership, location, employment and turnover of all registered businesses. It was possible to match 172 of the 184 pledge businesses to the IDBR extract from March 2015. An IDBR match could not be found for 12 of the 184 businesses – the main reason for non-match was that the pledge business was relatively new and therefore not on the register yet; it should be possible to find a match in future IDBR extracts.