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

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Pledge Statistics
25/02/20

Scottish Business Pledge – Statistical Overview January 2020

Original Pledge Elements

Between May 2015 and September 2019, the Business Pledge had nine elements:

  1. Paying the real Living Wage
  2. Not using exploitative zero hours contracts
  3. Supporting progressive workforce engagement
  4. Investing in youth
  5. Making progress on diversity and gender balance
  6. Committing to an innovation programme
  7. Pursuing international business opportunities
  8. Playing an active role in the community
  9. Committing to prompt payment

Making the Business Pledge meant that businesses:

  • Met the core commitment of paying the living wage;
  • Fulfilled at least two other Business Pledge elements immediately; and
  • Were committed to delivering all nine elements over the longer term.

Refreshed Pledge Elements

In October 2019 the refreshed Scottish Business Pledge was launched. It now features three core elements:

  • Payment of the real living wage;
  • No inappropriate use of zero hours contracts; and
  • Action to address the gender pay gap (new).

In addition, a menu approach asks businesses to commit to achieving any five of the following seven elements over time:

  1. Environmental impact (new)
  2. Investing in a skilled and diverse workforce (previously Investing in youth and Making progress on diversity and gender balance)
  3. Workforce engagement
  4. Innovation
  5. Internationalisation
  6. Support your community
  7. Prompt payment

Original Pledge Elements – Statistics

As at 31 January 2020, 711 businesses had signed up to the Business Pledge under the original criteria. The table below shows the number and share of businesses signing up to each of the nine pledge elements as they make their commitment.

Pledge Element Businesses % Share
Not using exploitative zero hours contracts 711 100%
Paying the living wage 711 100%
Playing an active role in the community 609 85.7%
Committing to an innovation program 606 85.2%
Committing to prompt payment 602 80.7%
Investing in Youth 574 80.7%
Supporting progressive workforce engagement 559 78.6%
Pursuing international business opportunities 538 75.7%
Making progress on diversity and gender balance 259 36.4%

As shown in the chart below, 115 businesses (16.2%) are already fulfilling all nine elements with the remaining 596 businesses working towards this. Note that overall, 639 business (89.9%) are already fulfilling at least six of the nine elements.

Refreshed Pledge Elements – Statistics

As at 31 January 2020, 11 businesses had signed up to the Business Pledge under the updated Business Pledge. The table below shows the number and share of businesses signing up to each of the ten pledge elements.

Pledge Element Businesses % Share
Not inappropriate use of zero hours contracts 11 100%
Payment of the real living wage 11 100%
Action to address the gender pay gap 11 100%
Investing in a skilled and diverse workforce 11 100%
Workforce engagement 11 100%
Innovation 11 100%
Prompt payment 11 100%
Environmental impact 10 90.9%
Support your community 10 90.9%
Internationalisation 7 63.6%

As shown in the chart below, six businesses (54.5%) are already fulfilling all ten elements with the remaining five businesses fulfilling at least eight.

Businesses signing up to the Pledge

As 31 January 2020, 722 business had signed up to the Business Pledge in total, representing 0.4% of Scotland’s registered business base. To find out more about them, we have matched the 722 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 641 of the 722 signatory businesses to the IDBR extract from March 2019. An IDBR match could not be found for 81 of the 722 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 641 signatory businesses that could be matched to the IDBR shows that:

The majority (65.1%) of signatory businesses were small, employing less than 50 people. However, as small firms make up 96.3% 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 127,225 jobs, 5.1% of all jobs in Scotland.
Nearly half (47.4%) of all signatory businesses operated in two broad sectors: 'Professional, scientific and technical activities' (39.8%) and 'Information and communication' (17.6%); whereas in the overall economy, these sectors make up 17.7% and 6.0% of firms respectively.
The pledge businesses have a total of 1,670 business sites (offices, shops, factories, etc.) across Scotland: over one third of these are situated in Glasgow City (19.2%) and City of Edinburgh (17.7%).

1Medium firms account for 18.3% of pledge signatories and large firms account for 15.6%; these firms respectively account for 2.2% and 1.4% of the Scottish business base overall.