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.
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:
