Yorkshire Ripper Peter Sutcliffe has launched a bid to challenge a High Court judge’s order which says that he can never be released.

Mr Justice Mitting announced his decision on July 16, ruling the serial killer must serve a “whole life” tariff.

A spokesman for the Judicial Communications Office confirmed he has started appeal moves.

She said: “I can now confirm that an application for leave to appeal the whole life order by Mr Justice Mitting has been lodged with the Court of Appeal.”

Now known as Peter Coonan, the former lorry driver, 64, from Heaton, was convicted at the Old Bailey in 1981.

Sutcliffe received 20 life terms for the murder of 13 women and the attempted murder of others in Yorkshire and Greater Manchester.

Mr Justice Mitting, when giving his ruling, said the murderer had caused “widespread and permanent harm to the living”.

He said: “This was a campaign of murder which terrorised the popu-lation of a large part of Yorkshire for years.

“The only explanation for it, on the jury’s verdict, was anger, hatred and obsession.

“Apart from a terrorist outrage, it is difficult to conceive of circumstances in which one man could account for so many victims.”

“Those circumstances alone make it appropriate to set a whole life term.”

He said he had read statements by relatives of six of the victims: “They are each moving accounts of the loss and widespread and permanent harm caused by six of his crimes. None of them suggest anything other than a whole life term would be appropriate.”

Sutcliffe is being held in Broadmoor after being transferred from prison in 1984 suffering from paranoid schizo-phrenia.

It was on July 5, 1975, just 11 months after his marriage, that he took a hammer and carried out his first attack on a woman.

No date has been fixed for a hearing.