Quotas, quotas, quotas...

Merit should be the only guiding principle.

Whitehall's top civil servants will lose part of their bonus payments if they fail to recruit enough women, the Government said yesterday. They will also have to hit their targets for ethnic minority and disabled recruitment if they want to avoid being penalised when bonuses are being distributed.

Sir Gus O'Donnell, the Cabinet Secretary, announced the change as he published figures showing that the Civil Service has failed to meet some of its diversity targets set in 1998.

The Government wanted to have 35 per cent of posts in the Senior Civil Service - the top 4,000 jobs in Whitehall - filled by women by now. Instead the figure has gone up from 18 to 29 per cent.

Ministers also wanted 3 per cent of top civil servants to be disabled. The figure has gone up from 1.5 per cent to 2.3 per cent. But the Government has hit its target of getting the proportion of black and ethnic minority staff in the Senior Civil Service up from 1.5 per cent to 3.2 per cent.