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

Useful info
Pledge Statistics
16/07/18

Scottish Business Pledge – Statistical Overview July 2018

Pledge Elements

As at 11 July 2018, 512 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 512 100%
Not using exploitative zero hours contracts 512 100%
 Playing an active role in the community 423 82.6%
Committing to an innovation program 410 80.1%
Committing to prompt payment 404 78.9%
Investing in Youth 398 77.7%
Pursuing international business opportunities 395 77.1%
Supporting progressive workforce engagement 363 70.9%
Making progress on diversity and gender balance 195 38.1%

As shown in the chart below, 76 businesses (15%) are already fulfilling all nine elements with the remaining 436 businesses working towards this. Note that overall, 442 business (86%) 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 512 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 458 of the 512 signatory businesses to the IDBR extract from March 2017. An IDBR match could not be found for 54 of the 512 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 458 signatory businesses that could be matched to IDBR shows that:

The majority (67.7%) 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 102,930 jobs, 4.1% of all jobs in Scotland.
Nearly half (45.9%) of all signatory businesses operated in two broad sectors: 'Professional, scientific and technical activities' (28.4%) and 'Information and communication' (17.5%); whereas in the overall economy, these sectors make up 18.6% and 5.9% of firms respectively.
The pledge businesses have a total of 1,340 business sites (offices, shops, factories, etc) across Scotland: one third of these are situated in Glasgow City (18.3%) and City of Edinburgh (15.7%).


1Medium firms account for 15.3% of pledge signatories and large firms account for 17.0%; these firms respectively account for 2.2% and 1.4% of the Scottish business base overall.