Chairman, earlier this year, the Government announced that participation in the Budget Meal programme by HDB coffee shops would no longer be mandatory, citing feedback from patrons and hawkers.
I believe this is a step in the right direction. Amidst rising operational costs and long working hours, providing budget meals eats away at the already-thin profit margins of our hawkers, who often have to compromise the budget meal’s nutritional value to compensate for their diminished profit margins.
Nevertheless, stallholders in Socially-Conscious Enterprise Hawker Centres (SEHCs) continue to offer such value meals, as Centre operators are required to ensure the availability of affordable meal options.
It was also revealed last year that stallholders at Bukit Canberra Hawker Centre were contractually bound to provide free meals for low-income residents at their own expense, although this was then subsequently scrapped. Meanwhile, the discounts offered to Pioneer Generation, Merdeka Generation and certain CHAS card holders are absorbed by the hawkers themselves.
Although many Singaporeans feel the pinch of rising hawker food prices, it is unfair for our hawkers to shoulder the direct responsibility for providing affordable meals.
As I have shared in my speech on the Hawker Motion in 2024, the Government could provide discounts for lower-income Singaporeans based on their CHAS card type.
As it is, cardholders who present their CHAS card at a participating hawker would be able to receive a discount on their food, the quantum of which corresponds to the colour of their CHAS card, whether it is blue, orange, or green. Importantly, the cost of these discounts should not be imposed on the hawkers, but on the Government instead. Rather than subsidise high net worth individuals who, like low income households all receive the same amount of CDC vouchers, the subsidy would be better directed to those who need them the most.
With this, the responsibility of ensuring the affordability of well-balanced and nutritious meals would be shared much more equitably across the various stakeholders, a point which I have shared in a Parliamentary question in 2025. By enhancing governmental support to ensure affordable meals whilst securing the livelihoods of our hawkers, younger players could come in and rejuvenate the hawker scene, whilst bucking the trend of a rising number of veteran hawkers opting to call it quits and retire.
