Fair Work First: grants awarded - 2024 to 2025

What Fair Work First is

Fair Work First requires employers receiving public sector grants to adopt fair work practices. This includes paying workers at least the real Living Wage. Funders can approve limited exceptions to this requirement in specific circumstances. 

This data focuses on the policy's second year (first full financial year) of implementation.

How we collected the data

We contacted public bodies across Scotland to request data on grants awarded between April 2024 and March 2025. This included:

• individual Scottish Government directorates
• all 32 local councils,
• 132 other public bodies

Overall, 106 responses were received from across the public sector, of which 39 reported awarding no relevant grants during this period.

The data excludes non-discretionary funding (such as grant-in-aid funding to public bodies, local government general revenue funding, and statutory payments and automatic entitlements where funders have no discretion over award criteria) as Fair Work First conditionality does not apply to these funding streams.

Data limitations

Please note these limitations when interpreting the findings: 

• this analysis covers survey respondents only and does not capture all public sector grants across Scotland
• some double counting may occur where grants are passed between public bodies before reaching final recipients 
• an organisation may receive more than one exception, therefore the numbers in tables 2 and 3 do not represent the number of individual organisations with an approved exception

Key findings

Between April 2024 and March 2025:

• 5,234 grants were awarded with Fair Work First conditions with a combined value of £3.42 billion
• 176 approved exceptions were awarded to meeting the real Living Wage condition - these grants had a combined value of £385.4 million
• most exceptions covered only part of an organisation's workforce - the most commonly cited reason was for the employment of apprentices and 16–17-year-olds

Detailed breakdown

Table 1: Fair Work First grants and exceptions 2024 to 2025

Category	Number	Value (£ million)
Grants with Fair Work conditions	5,234	£3,420.0
Exceptions to the real Living Wage condition approved	176	£385.4
Exception requests declined	1	Not applicable

Source: Scottish Government request for information from funding organisations across the public sector in Scotland (June 2025).

Table 2: exceptions by sector 2024 to 2025

Sector	Number of exceptions
Private sector	84
Public sector	72
Third sector	20

Source: Scottish Government request for information from funding organisations across the public sector in Scotland (June 2025).
Note: an organisation may receive more than one exception, therefore the numbers above do not represent the number of individual organisations with an approved exception. 

Table 3: workforce coverage of exceptions 2024 to 2025

Workforce coverage	Number of exceptions
Part of workforce	155
Whole workforce	3
Unknown	18

Source: Scottish Government request for information from funding organisations across the public sector in Scotland (June 2025).
Note: an organisation may receive more than one exception, therefore the numbers above do not represent the number of individual organisations with an approved exception. 

View previous data

Previous Fair Work First grant data covering July 2023 to March 2024 is available in the gov.scot archive.