Opening Remarks by Minister Grace Fu at the Launch of the OneService Mobile App at Clean Up South West!

Jan 25, 2015

It is my pleasure to be here with all of you, to “Clean Up South West!”!

Clean Up South West! 

Clean Up South West! is an annual district ‘Trash for Groceries’ recycling exercise for the community. It encourages residents to bring their recyclables to participating CCs/RCs in exchange for groceries at ECo Day Out 2015 @ South West on 1 February.

South West District is involving youths in championing efforts to keep our environment clean. Under the ExxonMobil Bright Spots Challenge @ South West, the volunteers will help clean up the neighbourhoods in the South West District, and provide ideas and feedback on cleanliness and other municipal matters. The Challenge is a local initiative led by the South West Community Development Council (CDC), supported by the National Environment Agency (NEA) and ExxonMobil Asia Pacific Pte Ltd.

Cleanliness is one of the top municipal issues that residents care about. Agencies receive an average of 1,000 cases of feedback on cleanliness per week. The responsibility to keep our environment clean goes beyond the cleaners. There is only so much our cleaners can do. It requires all of us to take an active interest and do our part to keep our living environment clean as we would with our own homes.

What SWCDC is doing is absolutely the right thing to do – mobilizing the community to keep the public places clean. And it is commendable that the students from Hillgrove Secondary and ITE College West have come forward, and on a Sunday morning, to help clean up the neighbourhood. 

OneService Mobile App 

Besides cleanliness, there are other municipal issues that affect our living environment, such as stray animals in the neighbourhood, maintenance of trees and greenery, as well as maintenance of walkways, street lights and roads. 

The Municipal Services Office was set up in October 2014 to work with eight government agencies (NEA, LTA, NParks, AVA, PUB, HDB, Police and PA) to improve the delivery of municipal services in public areas in Singapore. By and large, our agencies are already providing good municipal services. However, there is scope for improvement, particularly in areas where multiple agencies need to be involved, or when the issue is complex in nature. MSO will work with our partners on improvements in these areas, so as to improve the living environment for Singaporeans. 

One thing that we have been working on is to improve the public’s experience in dealing with agencies – such as to make it more convenient for members of the public to give their feedback, in handling mis-directed feedback, and in responding to the public’s requests jointly and collectively when multiple agencies are involved. To this end, MSO is setting up a new feedback channel, which we are launching today - the OneService mobile app. 

The OneService app is a common platform for the public to provide feedback on municipal issues with convenience. There is no need for you to know which agency to send your feedback to, as the categories are organised by issues, such as trees and greenery, roads and footpaths. If you see a damaged footpath or a damaged road sign, all you need to do is to select the Roads & Footpaths category, attach a photo of the damaged footpath or road sign and send it to us with your comments. The system will ensure that your feedback is sent to the right agency for action. 

The geo-tagging function in the app will automatically pinpoint the exact location of the problem, while the photo-taking feature will provide a better picture to the agencies on what you are referring to. All these information will help agencies to ascertain the exact nature of the problem and take action promptly. 

I hope that you will find the OneService app useful and practical. We will continue to add more features as we go along. Hence, we value your feedback so that we could progressively enhance the app to be even more user-friendly.

Although the app is designed to be simple and easy to use, it has involved a lot of hard work from various agencies and my team at MSO. To have this one-stop platform, it actually means we have to break down silos among the agencies, work with one another, agree on how to treat cases and arrive at a common protocol. That is really an achievement. I would like to thank the CEOs of the agencies and my team in MSO for bringing about this app. I would also like to tell the CEOs here that your teams in QSM and in operations, who are working with MSO, have been absolutely wonderful. They have been most cooperative and want to do their utmost best for the public. I thank the CEOs and their staff for their excellent attitudes.

Partnership with the Community 

Through providing feedback using the app, and through playing an active role in taking good care of your local living environment, all of you here are a key partner to MSO and our partner agencies in creating a clean and pleasant community that you will be proud of to call home. I speak on behalf of all the agency partners present here today that we value this partnership very much – with the people, the community very much. And we thank you for this. 

Thank you all for coming to participate in today’s Clean Up initiative. This is a very useful initiative and I hope that more members of the community would step forward to take ownership and be involved, as our student participants are doing this morning. On why we are here at this particular location, it is no secret that the idea of MSO arose from one of the issues that Mayor Low had, having to deal with multiple agencies – also known as the “fishball stick” problem. That is why we thought it is appropriate for us to come back to Bukit Gombak. The public expects the public service to work together and resolve issues and that is what we are determined to do. We look forward to everyone using the OneService app and giving us your feedback on municipal issues!