The Court of Justice of the European Union has said that some employers can stop people as young as 30 from applying for some jobs because they are too old.

The Court said that Germany could keep in place a law which prevents people over 30 from applying to join its fire service. The German authorities had argued that its fire service recruits needed to be younger than 30 so that they could do 15 or 20 years of active service before being moved off front line duties and that there was a plentiful supply of younger workers to replace them.

Catherine Hey of law firm Pinsent Masons commented that the ruling would have an effect on age discrimination cases in the UK.  She said these cases were relatively rare but the ruling would be binding and Employment Tribunals would have to apply it as far as possible within UK law.

The European Union’s Equal Treatment Directive allows employers to treat workers of different ages differently when there is a ‘genuine occupational requirement’. The Court said that the German fire service’s actions fell within this exemption.

Hey said that the German case was very different to last year’s UK air traffic control case where applicants over 36 were barred from applying for positions: “In the German case there was very clear evidence that the performance of firefighters declines with age. They had sophisticated evidence about how the lung capacity of people over 45 declines. In the air traffic control case there was hardly any evidence at all and when you don’t have evidence it looks like discrimination, like you are acting on a stereotype of how older people behave.”