Scottish Business Pledge - Statistical Overview May 2016

Pledge Elements

As at 29 April 2016, 247 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 247 100%
Not using exploitative zero hours contracts 247 100%
Pursuing international business opportunities 195 79%
Playing an active role in the community 180 73%
Investing in Youth 178 72%
Committing to an innovation program 174 70%
Committing to prompt payment 168 68%
Supporting progressive workforce engagement 144 58%
Making progress on diversity and gender balance 92 37%

Chart 1 below shows that 27 businesses are already fulfilling all nine elements and that 187 businesses (76%) are already fulfilling at least six of the nine elements.

Chart

Pledge Businesses

To find out more about the pledge businesses, we have matched the 247 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 228 of the 247 pledge businesses to the IDBR extract from March 2015. An IDBR match could not be found for 19 of the 247 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.

Analysis of the 228 pledge businesses that could be matched to IDBR shows that:

The pledge businesses collectively provide 57,650 Scottish jobs.
The majority (69%) of pledge businesses are small, employing less than 50 people. However, small firms dominate the overall Scottish economy, making up 96% of all businesses, meaning that the Pledge is being taken up by relatively more medium and large businesses.
Over 44% of all pledge businesses operate in two broad sectors: ‘Information and communication’ and ‘Professional, scientific and technical activities’.
The pledge businesses have a total of 797 business sites (offices, shops, factories, etc) across Scotland.

Table