Recruiters are frequently asking rec-to-rec companies to break the law on age discrimination, the chair of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation’s rec-to-rec sector group has said.

Charlotte Mullen told Recruiter that clients regularly made unlawful requests to the group’s members, such as “don’t send anyone over the age of 30”. She said that “the consensus” at the group’s November meeting was that “quite a few people that we speak to are ignoring the age discrimination laws”.

Mullen said that where this happened members informed clients that the request was illegal, and that they couldn’t act on it, because the rec-to-rec would also be breaking the law.

She added that as a result, virtually all the rec-to-recs at the group’s meeting in November had told clients who made such requests that they couldn’t work with them.

Keith Canning, sales director at rec-to-rec Aston Taylor, told Recruiter that “from time to time” clients asked them questions such as “how old is the client?”. “We tell them that we can’t respond to this request for information,” he said.

Neil Smith, business manager at Jarvis-Knight Recruitment in Leeds, said that recently one client had told him they didn’t employ anyone over the age of 55 “because everyone else in the office was under 35 and the older person wouldn’t fit in culturally”.

Such examples were uncommon, said Smith, but when they did occur, “we just tell them just say we cannot do that”.

Rachel Bates, a director of McMillan Bates Consulting, said she had never come across an example of a client discriminating on the grounds of age.

As David Royden, a partner and head of employment law at Laytons Solicitors, in Manchester, explained: “Acting at the behest of a third party is no justification for an act of discrimination, and anyone that acted on such a request would themselves be guilty of age discrimination.”

The REC rec-to-rec sector group is currently working on policies to stamp out ageism as part of its plans to encourage diversity in the sector, Mullen added.