A London local authority has announced an "aspiration" to charge no council tax within the next eight years.

Westminster City Council said it could stop levying the charge by 2012 because of cost savings it is hoping to make, it emerged on Wednesday.

Conservative councillor Kit Malthouse said current rates of efficiency improvements put the Tory-controlled town hall on track meet the goal but stressed it was not an outright commitment.

Another £40 million would have to be shaved from the council's annual budget, although this is a relatively small share of the authorities current spending of £800 million per year.

However residents would still have to pay towards London policing and fire service costs as well as the mayor's tax precept.

Malthouse told the council's 50 top managers at a conference last week that: "What we've done at Westminster is reduce the council tax by using more IT, doing things in a different more efficient way, and by contracting out to the private sector."

However leader of the Labour opposition group Paul Dimoldenberg said the move would mean voters paying more in the private sector for services the council failed to provide.

"There's no such thing as a free lunch and if residents don't pay for it in council tax they will pay for it in other charges because there is no way the government is going to pay for everything," he told the BBC.

"I don't know how he expects to pay for the streets to be cleaned. There's only so much you can achieve through efficiency savings.

"I am baffled by his financial take on this because he has got his statutory responsibilities and one of those is educating every school-age child in the borough."