Sam Gyimah, the universities minister, said Oxford and Cambridge had made little progress on diversity since his student days

The universities minister has criticised Oxford and Cambridge for their lack of diversity and warned them that they would be fined if they did not meet admissions targets.

Sam Gyimah, who was elected as the first black president of the Oxford Union in 1997, said it was staggering that the two institutions had the best minds but “still do not know what the best way is when it comes to applications”.

His intervention comes after the two universities released admissions statistics revealing that some colleges had made no offers to black students or accepted only one a year between 2012 and 2016.

The Labour MP David Lammy, who was the first black British student to study at Harvard, described Oxford last month as a “bastion