Interim Equalities Report 2023

We’re Scotland’s development bank. By the end of the Financial Year 2022 / 2023, since launch we’ve committed over £415 million of investment across 27 businesses and projects that will provide a positive impact, in support of our missions. Our investments have supported additional funding from other sources of more than £680 million to help Scotland become a fairer, sustainable, and ambitious society.

Details of all our investments can be found on our website.

Our Business Plan sets out our ambition to:

As a key part of that ambition, the Business Plan also makes our commitment to promoting Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion clear. Importantly, this includes equality of opportunity for investment.

Beyond the impact we want to make as an employer and purchaser in Scotland, our investment activity plays a crucial role in catalysing conditions for change. We don’t take our role as an impact investor for granted and act with intent to use our position of influence for good. We are acutely aware of our responsibility to contribute positively to Scotland’s communities, society, environment, and the economy with the resources we have available and through our insights and engagement. And we’re ambitious about supporting broader change.

As an example, we’re proud that our investments have directly impacted businesses and communities in 20 Scottish Local Authority areas, and 100% of the businesses and projects we’ve directly invested in have committed to adopting Fair Work First Principles that ensure high-quality employment for Scottish workforces.

We acknowledge, however, that truly transformative change for Scotland can’t be achieved single-handedly. We also acknowledge that we’re still learning. Working in partnership has, therefore, been and will continue to be a key focus for us as we build relationships with key stakeholders, from across the public, private and third sectors. This includes developing constructive relationships with specialists in Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion.

As to where we are, our first Equality Strategy was published in 2022. That Strategy set out four Equality Outcomes to 2025. Designed to cover all protected characteristics, the Equality Outcomes are:

These inter-connected Equality Outcomes provide the framework for what we will do over the Equality Outcomes period to achieve our ambitions. As we go forward, within that framework, we acknowledge that our plans may change, so we can build on what we achieve, learn from our experiences, and look outside to learn from others. In this report you’ll read about how, in the last year, we’ve started to integrate equality into our insight, investment and impact through a range of activities, ideas, and initiatives, building the foundations for our ambition. The report also sets out progress towards our Equality Outcomes and provides pay and equalities monitoring data for our team.

We’ll also highlight some planned activity for 2023-2024, to illustrate our continued focus on achieving our Equality Outcomes.

Looking forward, we’ll publish our next Equalities mainstreaming report in 2025. This will provide further evidence of our commitments in this space and report fully on progress against our Equalities Outcomes. Equality Outcomes for the period 2025-2029 will also be published at that time.