The Scottish Business Pledge is currently undergoing a review and not accepting new members at this time
As at 25 July 2019, 650 businesses had signed up to the Business Pledge – representing 0.4% 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 |
Not using exploitative zero hours contracts | 650 | 100% |
Paying the living wage | 650 | 100% |
Playing an active role in the community | 557 | 85.7% |
Committing to an innovation program | 550 | 84.6% |
Committing to prompt payment | 543 | 83.5% |
Investing in Youth | 522 | 80.3% |
Pursuing international business opportunities | 502 | 77.2% |
Supporting progressive workforce engagement | 497 | 76.5% |
Making progress on diversity and gender balance | 240 | 36.9% |
As shown in the chart below, 106 businesses (16.3%) are already fulfilling all nine elements with the remaining 544 businesses working towards this. Note that overall, 580 business (89.2%) are already fulfilling at least six of the nine elements.
To find out more about the signatory businesses, we have matched the 650 signatory businesses to the Inter-Departmental Business Register (IDBR). The IDBR is a database of all businesses that are VAT and/or PAYE registered. It was possible to match 575 of the 650 signatory businesses to the IDBR extract from March 2018. An IDBR match could not be found for 75 of the 650 businesses – the main reason for non-match was that the signatory business was relatively new and therefore not on the register yet.
1Medium firms account for 18.8% of pledge signatories and large firms account for 14.8%; these firms respectively account for 2.2% and 1.4% of the Scottish business base overall.