Southern Affordable Immigration Advice Service (SAIAS)

Southern Affordable Immigration Advice Service (SAIAS) provides specialist immigration advice and services to Portsmouth and the surrounding areas. We are a competitively priced social enterprise and 100% of our fees are put back into the business to supplement advice for others.

Citizens Advice Portsmouth has long provided specialist immigration services for those asylum and immigration clients most in need in our community. Despite our success, we understood that our organisation could do so much more for the people of this city if we grew our service. Therefore, we are officially launched SAIAS on 12 May 2023

We propose that CAP can offer the provision of a low-cost, self-sustainable, fee-paying immigration service (under a Social Enterprise model), which would develop into a self-sustainable mode of operation, ensuring CAP's ongoing operations whilst maintaining vital support to the immigration and asylum community in the city, sustaining our vision of a long-term immigration service to those most at risk.

CAP pledges to continue meeting our charitable purposes and ideals with all revenue from this fee-paying service reinvested back into our existing free advice services, the vision being to help as many individuals as we can throughout the city. We aim to let no one fall through the cracks in our community. Without funding and recourse to this new approach, CAP will lose valuable resources and the city will lose valuable advisers.

Portsmouth is a designated asylum cluster area in the South of England. Access to a low-cost immigration service is essential to help the most vulnerable in our community. Demand is rising, with CAP alone seeing a year-on-year rise in referrals/requests for our vital services. Since the launch of SAIAS we have assisted 554 immigration clients and CAP envisages this to rise in the years to come.

This project puts CAP at the forefront of a city-wide collaborative program, with specialist services and advisers who can meet the growing immigration needs of the city and beyond.

We are a specialist service that compliments the advice supplied by other community organisations in our city. We want to support the most vulnerable people of Portsmouth and their needs, and we believe they would be best served if we were able to offer a fee-paying service to those clients who can afford to pay. We want to play our part in making Portsmouth a beacon for citizen's rights, protection, and respect.

For more information please visit: saias.org.uk