Lloyds Bank sets BAME targets with plan for 3% of senior roles to be held by black people by 2025

Lloyds Banking Group today admitted that only 0.6% of its senior management team are black and pledged to increase that proportion to at least 3% by 2025.

The bank was the first FTSE-100 company to commit to increasing its ethnic diversity but admitted today that black staff remained "significantly under-represented".

After setting a goal on diversity in 2018, 10.3% of all staff now identify as Black, Asian or Minority Ethnic (BAME) and 7.3% of senior management.

However, Lloyds said: "We recognise that our BAME target has not led to enough progress in the development of black colleagues to senior levels. We need to break that ceiling."

Even below senior management, only 1.5% of Lloyds staff are black.

Chief executive Antonio Horta-Osorio said: "It is clear that achieving an inclusive environment for everyone is our priority, but right now we have very specific challenges that we have to address for our black colleagues...

"The commitments we are making will not fix the issues overnight, and targets and measures will only take us so far but we have to challenge ourselves to do better and I am fully committed that we will do so."

Lloyds said it launched a plan to set up a new advisory board of BAME staff to shape the strategy and would work with external experts to develop a race education programme to remove bias in the bank.

All recruitment shortlists at "executive leader" will now have to have at least one BAME candidate and senior and middle management black staff will have specific development and sponsorship programmes to help them develop their careers.

Many finance firms are trying to address the shortage of black representation in their workforces.

At Goldman Sachs only 4% of executives, senior officials and managers are black and at Citi, only 2%.

Lloyds's 2018 target was that by this year it would have a 10% BAME workforce and 8% in senior roles.