TV’s Fairy Jobmother Hayley Taylor has a word of warning for employers who might one day be faced with hiring rioters who looted shops and destroyed property during August’s nights of mayhem across England: “As an employer employing people and having that responsibility, you should be astute enough to know whether someone deserves a second chance or not, or whether somebody really cannot be moulded.

“But if you see that person sitting in front of you, and you think this person can be moulded and therefore I’m going to give this person a chance, then you have to stand by that.”

Taylor spoke exclusively with Recruiter as she prepared to launch a series of appearances on behalf of job board Fish4Jobs at job fairs across the UK this month. She said that she would tell rioters: “Hopefully you will learn by your mistakes, but once you have got that criminal record, it’s going to be 50 times harder to find work. But ensure that when you become a parent, you parent better than your own parents have.”

In addition to appearing on two Fairy Jobmother series in the UK, Taylor made one series of the programme in the US where she became familiar with challenges facing the jobless there and the US welfare benefits system.

If she could export any aspect of the UK system to the US, Taylor said, “it would be the fact that we have the government-funded training organisations. There is something for people to use as a stepping stone.”

“I found it very distressing that once welfare had stopped, that person literally was homeless; supermarket trolleys everywhere and that was very upsetting,” she said. “But on the other hand,” she added, “it is that constant reminder that to provide for your family and have that sense of well-being, you need to go out there and work.”