A government plan to diversify the civil service is failing – just weeks after it was launched. Although the government launched a ‘ten-point plan’ aimed at boosting the number of black and ethnic minorities in the civil service last November, and announced it would link the annual bonuses of top civil servants to how well they were doing to promote diversity, government figures shows hardly any change in the numbers of Black and Asian people moving into senior positions across Whitehall. The current national percentage of ethnic minorities in Britain is 7%, yet only 3.2% of grade five and above civil servants come from an ethnic background. Trevor Phillips, Commission for Racial Equality chairman, has blasted the government for failing to make sufficient progress, saying it was ‘disgraceful’ that only one government department was headed by an ethnic minority – Suma Chakrabati, permanent secretary at the Department for International Development.