Bristol City Council is to begin a staff reorganisation and freeze on recruitment to release £4m for service improvements.

Council leader Cllr Barbara Janke said: ‘We are under no illusions about how difficult this project will be to deliver.' The authority's ‘Productivity project' will see a reduction in the number of people employed by the council but without redundancies. Instead, the council plans to use new technology and ‘smarter' ways of working to release staff from some departments and redeploy them into priority areas.