Michelle Mone quotes Whitney Houston in maiden Lords speech

Entrepreneur Michelle Mone has delivered her maiden speech in the House of Lords. Photo: PA

The Tory peer, who carved out success with her lingerie firm, Ultimo, said leading a UK government task force into how to encourage more entrepreneurship in deprived areas had given her fresh insights into problems faced by other women.

“I found that the greatest barriers for start-ups are not just a lack of capital, or expertise, but the loneliness and lack of confidence, and poor access to support networks.

“These barriers are experienced mostly by women and although I feel it’s the best it’s ever been since I started my business, we still have a long way to go.

“Just 20 per cent of SMEs are led by women, and as a working mother of three I know how hard it can be.

“Being an entrepreneur can be the loneliest job in the world,” Lady Mone said.

The businesswoman told fellow peers that she grew up in a Glasgow tenement flat with “no bath or shower, and only a cupboard for a bedroom” before she left school at 15.

“I am dyslexic and this speech is harder than any business I have started,” Lady Mone said of her intervention in the debate.

Lady Mone criticised a “doom and gloom” culture that sometimes dominated the national outlook as she insisted a positive mental attitude was essential for business success.

The Tory peer said she wanted to help create a business culture where people from any background believed they could succeed.

Stating that inspiration was a key to moving forward, Lady Mone quoted lyrics from Whitney Houston’s song The Greatest Love Of All, as she told fellow peers: “I believe the children are our future, teach them well and let them lead the way.”

On the eve of International Women’s Day, in her first speech in the House of Lords, the Conservative peer said more needed to be done to unleash the business potential of women in the UK.

Lady Mone said that if the skills of all the women out of work in Britain were utilised it would create economic activity of between £15 billion and £21 billion per year.

Earlier, the first female bishop to sit in the House of Lords has spoken of the need for “gender parity”.

The Bishop of Gloucester, the Rt Rev Rachel Treweek, said the day was not about “gender competition but gender parity”.

In her maiden speech, she told peers that women and men, girls and boys, were of equal value and must be able to fulfil their potential.

Hitting out at the unequal treatment of women across the world, the Bishop voiced concern that over the past 10 years more young people in Gloucester reported not feeling confident about the future “with girls feeling less confident than boys”.

She said such findings were reflected in other national reports, adding: “International Women’s Day reminds us that we have much work yet to do together, to work for the flourishing and valuing of women worldwide as well as in the UK.”

The Bishop said that in the early 1990s women could not be priests in the Church of England and when she went to theological college “I never imagined that one day I might be called to be a bishop”.

She said it had been a great surprise and “somewhat daunting” to be appointed Bishop of Gloucester last year and “extremely humbling” to become the first female diocesan bishop.

Opening the debate, women and equalities minister Baroness Williams of Trafford praised women who had “blazed a trail into traditionally male spaces” and insisted the Government was working to broaden girls’ career choices.

She said the gender pay gap had narrowed but still stood at just over 19% and must be tackled through greater pay transparency.

Lady Williams warned: “We won’t achieve equality for women while two are being killed by their partners every week, while they are experiencing sexual harassment on the street, in schools, workplaces and online, and while they are enduring forced marriages and FGM.”

Condemning the “climate of fear” created by violence against women, she said combating this was a key government priority.