By Dominic Casciani BBC News Online community affairs reporter

Fiona Mactaggart, in the job for just three weeks, said the Home Office had been unfairly "hoisted by its own petard" because its lead in recruiting from minority communities was still being translated into senior civil service positions.

Five other government departments had no senior civil servants from minority communities, despite programmes to boost representation, the figures compiled by the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) found.

Outside of Whitehall, a larger study of how well public bodies are meeting new race equality duties found a third of organisations had already failed at the first hurdle.

According to the CRE's figures, all departments with the exception of the Ministry of Defence have minorities in their workforces that represent the population.

Whitehall departments which had done best at promoting minorities to senior positions were International Development, the Law Officer's Department and the Northern Ireland Office.

Four Whitehall departments and the Welsh assembly had no senior ethnic minority staff, the survey found.

The Home Office has the best record of recruiting ethnic minority staff - almost 20%. But it fell down the CRE's league table to 14th out of 20 because only 2.7% of those were in senior positions by October 2002.

'Real recruitment success'

Defending her department, Ms Mactaggart said the CRE had used old figures that did not reflect the effort that had gone into changing its recruitment practices.

The Home Office has been hoisted by its own petard for making a real success in recruiting more people from black and Asian communities Fiona Mactaggart, race equality minister

"The Home Office has been hoisted by its own petard for making a real success in recruiting more people from black and Asian communities and therefore as a ratio we don't do so well in this table.

"Our numbers of senior staff in relation to the overall number of ethnic minority employees looks relatively poor [in the CRE figures].

"But we are taking action to tackle the fact that we haven't done as well as we would have liked to do."

Ms Mactaggart said the latest unpublished figures from April 2003 showed the Home Office had hit Whitehall's 3.2% target for senior recruitment of minorities more than a year early.

A quarter of staff on the department's fast-track for promotion were from minority communities and she wanted a more ambitious ethnicity target for senior positions.

Public duties

The Whitehall figures accompany the first major survey of the impact of race legislation changes made in 2000.

That legislation places a duty on 43,000 public bodies to promote race equality at all levels - from recruitment through to dealing with the public.

The survey of some 3,000 organisations found one third had already put words into action - but another third had missed a legal deadline to come up with a plan.

Good intentions are no longer enough, we need to see change Trevor Phillips, CRE

The worst performing sector was education. Only a fifth of bodies contacted responded to the CRE survey. Of those, more than 50% had not set any targets as required by the legislation.

Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the CRE, said: "The fact that a significant minority appears to be sitting on its hands means that if we are to reduce inequality we have to turn up the heat on some of the slow coaches," said Mr Phillips.

"Good intentions are no longer enough. We need to see change.

He praised authorities which were leading the way, saying seven out of 10 reported their services had been improved by the changes.

But he added: "Our job is to make sure the bottom third catch up with the rest. We want to give encouragement. No one wants to go to the law [to force change] but we will if we have to."