Britain’s most senior judge predicted last night that prisons would end up full of “geriatric lifers” because of the jail terms judges must now impose.

Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers cast doubt on the 2003 guidelines for sentencing murderers because they had almost doubled the length of time that killers serve.

The guidelines were set out by David Blunkett, then Home Secretary, in the Criminal Justice Act 2003, Lord Phillips told an audience at Birmingham University. The starting points that judges now had to use when sentencing had the effect of “ratcheting up” sentences in a manner that would be regretted many years from now.

Lord Phillips also expressed concern about current proposals by the Law Commission, the Government’s law reform watchdog, to create different categories of murder. If these changes were implemented, he said, current sentencing guidelines would need to be rewritten and perhaps abolished.

He said: “I hope that there will be a thorough rethink about the extent to which the statutory guidelines are desirable.” The reason, he added, was that under current guidelines the proposed categories of murder would attract very different sentences, with starting points as far apart as 15 and 30 years.

He proposed another way to reform the law on murder, that may lead to fewer not guilty pleas and, therefore, far fewer trials. It would involve scrapping the mandatory life sentence for murder and, instead, creating a single offence of homicide, leaving judges to impose the right sentence according to the seriousness of the offence.

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