Kerr said the Government could leverage its position as a trader to make companies think hard about their hiring and promotion strategies.
Kerr is the BITC national director for Race For Opportunity and was commenting on the recent British Social Attitudes survey, which found 30% of British adults classify themselves as prejudiced – an increase of five percentage points since 2001.
Unskilled manual labourers were the most likely to class themselves as prejudiced, with 41% reporting prejudice, a rise of 21 percentage points since 1991. This was followed by supervisors and skilled manual labourers at 38%, an increase of 6 percentage points since 1991, but down on 2002 figures.
The least prejudiced occupation class were professionals, employers and managers at 26%, which decreased 7 percentage points since 1991. Kerr said this is the group most likely to reach senior management positions.
"One of our biggest aims is coaching out unconscious bias in leaders," she said. "This would, I believe, go some way in challenging racial prejudice in these self-reporting groups of working individuals."
She warned that without education in workplaces, the problem would continue. "The first thing to do is to bring this issue to the surface," she said. "But this is only the first step. After this has been done business needs to commit to ways to tackle it effectively."
The increasingly diverse make-up of British society means that it is "not sustainable" for business to ignore the issue.
"One in three of the UK workforce will come from an ethnic minority background within the next two years," Kerr said.
"In terms of those people contributing to the country's output and taxes, added to the skills they can provide, to have any form of prejudice around that population just doesn’t make any sense."
