The first biometric passports were issued in the UK this week, as a debate on their role in the national identity card scheme continued in Parliament.

The new passports will be rolled out gradually over the next few months and by August all renewals will be replaced by new-style documents, which include an electronic chip holding a facial biometric.

The passport renewal process is key to the lastest defeat of the government’s ID card plan.

The legislation enabling the scheme has already been amended and has been passed once by the House of Lords and twice by the Commons.

But in the Lords this week, peers insisted, by a vote of 227 to 166, that the government’s plan to issue ID cards with all passport renewals from 2008 be scrapped because it violates the voluntary nature of the scheme.

In the last Commons vote on the bill in February, MPs approved the government’s measure on automatic registration on the central identity register for all passport renewals.

But speaking in a Lords debate on Monday, Conservative Baroness Anelay of St John’s described the measure as ‘compulsion by stealth’.

Home Secretary Charles Clarke has vowed to fight to keep the plan as it is when it returns to the House of Commons.

The facial biometrics technology used in the passport scheme maps key features such as the distances between eyes, nose, mouth and ears. This is then digitally coded and stored on a chip.

More than 40 countries across the world are introducing biometric passports to comply with International Civil Aviation Organisation standards and the US visa-waiver scheme.

The new scheme will also cut fraud, says the government.