About us
Built for one job,done properly.
Civitas HR is a London-based HR consultancy that works only with public sector organisations — and supplies the interim HR people those organisations need when advice is not the answer.
Our name
Civitas.
Civitas is the Latin for the body of citizens — the community, and the shared obligations that come with belonging to one. We chose it because the organisations we work with exist to serve that body: schools that teach its children, health services that treat it, councils that govern for it.
The three figures in our mark stand for those three sectors, and the arc above them for the community they answer to. The centre figure stands taller because whichever of the three you work in, yours is the one carrying the weight.
Why we exist
There is a well-served market for HR consultancy aimed at commercial employers, and there is a thin, expensive market for public sector organisations. What sits in between is a great deal of generic advice sold to schools, trusts and councils by firms that have never worked inside their constraints — advice that recommends varying contracts that cannot be varied, or timetables that ignore committee cycles.
Civitas HR was established in 2025 to close that gap: commercial-standard HR judgement, applied by practitioners who work inside public sector frameworks every week, at a price a public body can actually justify spending.
How we are structured
Deliberately small and deliberately senior. The person who scopes your matter handles it. There is no pyramid of junior consultants to keep busy, which is why we can turn work away when we are not the right firm for it — a luxury larger consultancies do not really have.
Alongside the consultancy we run an interim contractor supply arm, built because clients kept needing a person rather than an adviser and we did not want to hand them to a generalist agency that would spend the first fortnight learning their sector.
How we work
Five commitments
we will hold to.
These are the things we would want from a supplier, so they are the things we hold ourselves to.
We tell you when you do not need us
If the first call establishes that your issue is straightforward, or that your in-house team can handle it with a steer, we will say so. We would rather be the firm you call next time than the one that billed you this time.
The fee is agreed before the work
A written scope with a fixed fee or a stated day rate, including what is not covered. We do not bill outside an agreed scope without asking first.
You get a recommendation, not just options
Advice that lists three possibilities and declines to choose between them protects the adviser and helps nobody. We will tell you what we would do.
We write for the record
Everything we produce is written on the assumption it may be disclosed, published or read by a tribunal. That is simply the correct standard for public sector work.
Discretion is not a selling point, it is the baseline
We do not name clients without permission and we do not use live matters as marketing. The case studies on this site are anonymised composites and say so; if that means fewer of them than our competitors publish, that is an acceptable trade.
The basics
Civitas HR in short.
2025
Year established
London
Base, with UK-wide delivery
3
Sectors served, exclusively
2
Arms: consultancy and contractor supply
“We would rather be the small firm that three sectors trust completely than the large one that everybody has heard of and nobody rings first.”
Start with a conversation.
Thirty minutes, no charge, no pitch. Tell us the situation and we will tell you what we would do about it.
Prefer email? [email protected] · Or call 020 0000 0000