Mr Speaker, my colleagues have addressed other provisions in this Bill—including estate upgrading programmes, wildlife and strata management changes, and updates to HDB’s cost recovery framework. I have nothing to add on those Parts.
My concern is Part 4—the retroactive validation of past fee collections.
Parliament sometimes has to correct administrative mistakes. When an agency has been collecting fees without proper legal foundation and that gap is discovered, this House may need to regularise the position. That is unremarkable in itself.
What is not unremarkable is the full scope of what Parliament is being asked to do. We are not simply being asked to validate past collections. We are being asked to simultaneously extinguish citizens’ rights to challenge those collections in court—permanently, for anyone who had not commenced proceedings by 7 April 2026, the date of First Reading.
This is not mere legal housekeeping, it is a significant step, and Parliament deserves the information to assess whether it is a justified one. We have not been given that information.
The government’s own standard
In 2023, when this House debated the Constitution of the Republic of Singapore (Amendment No. 3) Bill—a bill to enable President Tharman to hold international appointments in his private capacity, with its operative provisions backdated to the date of his inauguration—then-Deputy Prime Minister Lawrence Wong stated that ‘backdating upsets expectations and prejudices individuals who rely on the existing law.’ He went on to argue that the backdating in that bill was acceptable because no one was actually prejudiced.
That is one possible test for when retrospective legislation may be appropriate, and a reasonable one. And it is precisely a test that Parliament cannot apply tonight, because the Government has not told us who was affected by these collections, or by how much, or for how long. We are being asked to bar citizens from bringing claims without knowing whether those claims would have had merit.
The government’s own benchmark—GST 2024
There is a second point the Government must address.
In the Goods and Services Tax (Amendment) Bill 2024, which addressed wrongly-charged GST on government fees, the Government drew a principled line. The eighteen fees it acknowledged as genuinely wrongly charged—collected against its own policy intent—were refunded. Validation was reserved for a separate category: fees the Government maintained were correctly charged in substance, where the legal basis was uncertain due to inconsistent agency interpretation. Refund for what was wrong in substance; validate for what was ambiguous in law.
This House approved that approach. Now consider where the agencies referred to in this bill sit on that spectrum. They did not merely charge fees on uncertain legal ground. They collected fees—and in HDB’s case, made deductions from acquisition compensation—without proper statutory authority. By the Government’s own 2024 logic, that is closer to the category that warrants restitution. Instead, Parliament is being asked to validate without refund and without any account of what was taken.
What Parliament has not been told
Mr Speaker, I am not asserting that large numbers of people suffered serious harm. I do not know that. Neither does this House, because the Government has not said.
For each of the four agencies in Part 4—BCA, HDB, NParks, URA—Parliament has not been given the duration of the lapse, the total amounts collected or deducted without authority, or any account of how many individuals were affected and to what extent. We are being asked to permanently bar legal proceedings without knowing what claims we are extinguishing.
The HDB compulsory acquisition deductions are where this matters most. When HDB acquires a resident’s flat, the resident is owed compensation as of right. If HDB was deducting its own administrative and legal costs from that compensation without statutory authority—which Clause 10 confirms it was—then affected residents received less than what the law entitled them to. Clause 18 prospectively authorises such deductions going forward; that is Parliament’s prerogative. But Part 4 simultaneously declares the past deductions always lawful, and closes the door on any legal challenge. Those who had already commenced proceedings before 7 April 2026 retain their rights; everyone else is permanently shut out from that date—an arbitrary line drawn at the moment of First Reading.
I would add only this. If the deductions were trivial and affected very few people, the Government can say so. The information exists. If the answer is reassuring, disclosure costs nothing. Its absence is harder to explain.
The systemic picture
I will not dwell on this, but it warrants a brief observation.
Four statutory boards under one ministry have simultaneously been found to have operated outside their statutory remit. The Bill regularises the legal position. It does not explain how this came about across all four agencies at once, and it puts no mechanism in place to prevent a recurrence.
Mr Speaker, in Mandarin please.
公平
议长先生。今天我们讨论的这项法案，涉及到一个非常基本的公平问题。
简单来说，一些政府部门在没有法律允许的情况下，向公众收取了一些手续费。现在，政府希望通过修改法律，让这些过去不合法的收费变得合法，并且彻底关上大门，不再允许受影响的市民通过法律途径讨回这些费用。
其中让我最关心的是，不合法费用中包括了建屋局在强制收回组屋时所扣除的相关费用。正如我的同事穆海民所指出的，面临组屋被强制收回的家庭，往往已经处于 (chǔ yú) 水深火热之中。对这些家庭而言，被扣除的每一毛钱，都是救命钱。
工人党认为，政府部门若在行政手续上出现错误，是可以纠正的。但是，纠正错误的方式，不应该是通过立法权将过去的错误一笔勾销，甚至剥夺老百姓讨回公道的权利。
政府必须做到透明、公开，并明确指出该错误究竟影响了多少国人？涉及的金额又有多少？为什么不考虑把错收的费用退还给国人？政府应当给国人一个清楚的交代，而不是通过立法让这件事不了了之。
Conclusion
Mr Speaker, the Workers’ Party’s position is not that administrative lapses can never be retrospectively corrected. They can, and this House has approved such corrections before.
The concern is more specific. Parliament is being asked to extinguish citizens’ legal rights without being given the basic information to assess whether that is appropriate—who was affected, by how much, and why restitution—that is, refunds to the affected individuals, especially those whose flats have been compulsorily acquired—was not considered. That information has not been provided. The Government’s own standard, set as recently as 2024, required more than this.
