Speech by Minister Grace Fu at the Municipal Services Awards Ceremony

Oct 17, 2019

A very big thank you to all of you for your support. Thank you all for keeping Singapore clean, connected, well-lit, safe – a wonderful living environment for everybody.

This year marks the 5th year of MSO (Municipal Services Office) and agencies coming together as OneService to serve residents. It is also the 5th edition of the Municipal Services Awards. I would like to first commend all the nominees and award recipients for going the extra mile for residents!

The number of nominations has been increasing. This year alone, we received 110 nominations, almost three times what we received in our first year. We are glad to see the support given to the work that the OneService community is doing and there is indeed much to celebrate.

We are conferring 23 awards today. The awards are given across three categories – Individual, Team, and Community. At each of these three levels, we can contribute to the improvement of the living environment by providing excellent municipal services. The OneService culture can be grouped into three “steps” whereby: 
a. Individual officers step into the shoes of residents, and take a resident-centric attitude; 
b. Agencies step across boundaries to collaborate, and take a team approach to problem-solving;
c. The community is enabled to step up and get involved, and partner agencies in finding better solutions.

So, three simple “steps” to capture what we do – “Step Into”, “Step Across”, and “Step Up”. I will elaborate on each of these.

Stepping into the shoes of residents

Every officer is an ambassador for our agencies and partners. Citizens may not understand our policies and programmes fully, but their perception of them will be shaped and affected by their interaction with officers on the ground.

One commendable officer is Andy Loh, a property officer from Jalan Besar Town Council. The Town Council received feedback from a resident about the area around a substation that he passed by daily, which had no proper footpath. Andy took the initiative to understand the ground situation, and walked the path that the resident had to take. This understanding and subsequent actions resulted in a new concrete footpath and other improvements around the substation that brought greater convenience and safety to residents. He left a positive impact and the resident wrote in to commend Andy.

This should be the DNA of every OneService officer– someone who proactively steps into the shoes of the residents to understand their problems, and thus is able to implement meaningful and effective solutions. 

Stepping across boundaries to collaborate

Municipal issues often involve multiple agencies finding solutions together. All agencies have their own mandates and rules that conscribe the authority and job scope of their officers. To develop effective solutions, we must take the initiative and work jointly with others by stepping across our respective boundaries. If necessary, lead the change in our respective organisations, to improve the way we operate. LTA, HDB, and URA have shown us how this is done.

In the past, in the area of illegal parking, LTA, HDB and URA had their respective hotlines and enforcement officers. Residents had to report the illegal parking and depending on where it occurred, work with the respective agency to resolve the problem.

With the Common Hotline and Enforcement for Parking Offences, agencies now tap on a common pool of parking wardens who are deployed more efficiently in patrolling and enforcing in all public roads and HDB and URA car parks. Agencies made significant changes to their internal processes and operational guidelines. By collaborating with one another, agencies improved the service experience of residents, and achieved cost and manpower savings. That is an important consideration of ours – how to meet higher expectations of the public and yet improve productivity and increase cost savings in the process. This is a great example of how by coming together, we are able to achieve multiple objectives. So this led to more effective enforcement against parking offences, and reduced inconvenience to the public.

Enabling the community to step up

Good municipal services require the support of the people in the community. Nine out of the 23 awardees today are in the Community Category, which recognises the important role of local communities.

Local communities are our valuable partners, in that they have a first-hand appreciation of the problems that are faced on the ground, and they know the local situation best. Therefore, I think they can be a very valuable partner to come up with effective solutions that meet the needs of the local community. 

One such example is the Community-Led Bicycle Education Programme. A group of volunteers formed the Nee Soon Central Active Mobility Patrol Team to solve the problem of bicycles parked indiscriminately around Yishun MRT station. With the help of Nee Soon Town Council and NParks, the volunteers put up banners to raise awareness, and tagged advisories on indiscriminately parked bicycles, before relocating them to a temporary storage space. Agencies provided support, with LTA coordinating the operations, and SPF officers helping to direct those who reported missing bicycles.

The solution provided by these volunteers helped resolve the issue of indiscriminate parking and tackled the root cause through public education. The number of indiscriminate parking of bicycles has remained low.

OneService is also tapping on the community at the national level. We are running a nationwide Love Our ‘Hood Youth Challenge 2019. This year, we see six youth teams working on projects related to noise, dog ownership, cleanliness, and use of Personal Mobility Devices (PMDs). A big thank you to our partners – NEA, LTA, NParks, and the Singapore Kindness Movement for supporting this initiative.

To me, this is the heart of OneService – where residents are supported to step up and work hand-in-hand with our agencies as Singapore Together, in service to the community.

Building A Culture of Recognition

We have come a long way over the last five years. Moving forward, how can we continue to build on this foundation that we have?

First, I would like to call for more recognition to be given to our officers – not just to be given an award once a year like this today, but also a compliment, a pat on the back for many who do exemplary work every single day, away from the public eye.

Continue to highlight to MSO good stories of your colleagues who have taken the extra step – whether it’s stepping into residents’ shoes, stepping across boundaries, or stepping up to partner the community to take ownership. We will also call on the public to highlight such cases to MSO. We will be featuring these stories on our social media channels, so look out for them!

Supporting Partnership with Community

We will also enable Government agencies and Town Councils to work together with residents over the next few months, with two new community functions on our OneService App.

a. First, government agencies and Town Councils can use a new function on the OneService App to survey residents on municipal matters. These can be on the colour to repaint our flats, opening hours of community facilities (such as basketball and futsal courts), and to gather feedback on interventions and programmes (such as on dengue prevention). We need an application where residents can come online to interact with one another, engage agencies, give their feedback and have a discussion, much like applications that gather people of similar interests. OneService would like to be that platform where members of the public and local community can give their feedback and also for agencies to have an easy way on an online platform to engage their stakeholders. This is where scalability can be achieved with great convenience to the public. This is something that’s going to be available, and has great potential. So I urge all the agencies, the Town Councils to consider using this platform meaningfully. In the future, residents can also suggest ways to improve their neighbourhood, and work with agencies and Town Councils to bring about them. They can suggest alternative uses, new facilities to be added, such as benches or exercise equipment. This will be a great channel to engage more in the neighbourhood, in addition to our conventional way of consulting grassroots organisations. 

b. Second, when residents give feedback via the OneService App, they will be prompted to do some follow-up tasks while agencies work on their feedback. For instance, if a resident reports on mosquito breeding, he will be given a “Community Challenge” which include activities like sharing public education infographics with family and friends on how to prevent mosquito breeding. Together, we really want to promote a virtuous cycle where residents, after raising feedback to agencies, can help increase awareness of actions we can take, and work along with agencies to address the dis-amenities or the problems. Having residents go beyond just giving us feedback – hopefully they can join us to be part of the solution to the problem. More details will be shared when these two features are launched on the OneService App later. 

Together, we can all make a difference 

Last but not least, I would like to thank all the officers and staff involved in the provision of municipal services. Our high standard of living environment is, in a very big way, owed to your dedication and hard work. Your relentless pursuit of excellence has given us a clean and liveable home. To all the award recipients, you have inspired us to do better. How many ‘steps’ can we take in the years ahead, as a OneService community, together with our residents? Let us embark on a “step challenge” to journey together to deliver better municipal services and create a better living environment for all. Thank you very much and congratulations!