Mr Speaker, most of the Bill is uncontroversial housekeeping. Hence, I focus my remarks on Part 4, which is of a rather different character.
Part 4 asks this House to declare that the sums collected over a period of years by four agencies under the MND, namely the HDB, the NParks, the URA, and the Commissioner of Building Control, were always validly collected.
When a statutory body has collected fees without the clear rule-making authority to do so, the responsible course is to come to Parliament, put the position right, and ensure that the underlying functions continue on a sound legal footing.
That said, Mr Speaker, I think this House should take a moment of genuine interest in how we came to need Part 4 at all. These are not minor agencies charging obscure fees. Three of them are statutory boards with long histories and well-resourced legal and policy functions behind them.
The list of affected collections includes some of the most routine transactions a citizen in Singapore will have with the state: paying to expedite a TOP application, paying to register as a renovation contractor, paying a release fee after a vehicle has been clamped in the carpark at the foot of one’s block.
For each of these, fees were being levied and collected, over a period that the Bill itself implies ran for years, on a legal basis that the Government now concedes was inadequate. It is a significant thing for this to have happened across four agencies, under four different parent Acts, and to have gone undetected for as long as it did.
I would therefore like to ask the Minister a few questions, not in a spirit of recrimination, but because this House and the public deserve clarity.
First, what is the aggregate quantum of the sums being validated under Part 4? How much money, in total, was collected under each of the four validating clauses, and over what period? Moreover, how many Singaporeans have been affected by these collections? That is information this House should have before it is asked to put the matter permanently to rest.
Second, on what legal basis did each of the agencies think they had the authority to impose these fees and charges in the first place? Every one of the validated categories was presumably charged pursuant to something: a rule, a subsidiary instrument, an administrative direction, or an internal policy.
It would assist this House, and bolster public confidence in the Bill, to understand what the legal basis was in each case, and why it was thought at the time to be sufficient. These are questions about how the relevant agencies arrived at their view of their own powers.
Third, how and when did the Government come to realise that there was a problem?
Fourth, what has the Government done to satisfy itself that this problem is confined to the four agencies and the categories listed in Part 4? A defect of this kind, arising across four agencies under four different parent Acts, is not the sort of thing one expects to find in isolation.
Are there something specific to the internal processes of these agencies that led all four of them to independently arrive on a mistaken view of their rule-making authority?
Or is there a possibility that the rule-making frameworks of our statutory bodies have a common weakness, which has now been exposed in these four cases, but may still be present in others?
Fifth, has a cross-Government review been commissioned in response to the discovery that led to Part 4? If so, who conducted it, what was its scope, and over what timeframe? Are there other agencies, other fee regimes, or other categories of collection which the Government has reason to believe may sit on similarly uncertain legal foundations? Should this House expect further validating legislation in future sessions? If no such review has been undertaken, I would be interested to know why not.
Sir, before we sign off on a retrospective validation covering years of collections across four separate statutes, I believe it is reasonable for the House to be informed about how and what else the Government knows about the matter, and what it is doing about it.
