Speech by SMS Sim Ann at Municipal Services Awards 2024 & MSO's 10th Anniversary

Oct 1, 2024

Good afternoon, everyone. I am delighted to join you at the Municipal Services Awards (MSA) 2024 Ceremony, as well as the Municipal Services Office (MSO)’s 10th anniversary celebration.

Over the last 10 years, MSO has given out nearly 200 awards to recognise projects that encouraged inter-agency collaboration and community partnerships. Today, we are excited to announce another 15 winners across the MSA Individual, Team and Community categories, and the Love Our ‘Hood winner for 2024.

I would like to commend 127 teams and individuals from agencies and the community, who were nominated for the MSA this year. Together, they exemplify the excellent work that agencies and residents are doing. While I am not able to share all their projects with you now, allow me to highlight a few of our winners today. The Love Our ‘Hood Award acknowledges sustained efforts from community groups who consistently improve our living environment.

This year, our award recipient is the Singapore Kindness Movement, better known as SKM. SKM has been leading outreach initiatives to promote pro-social norms and neighbourliness. SKM also adopts a data-driven approach to measure residents’ sentiments on social norms related to key municipal issues through its annual Graciousness Survey. Over the years, SKM has supported many ground-up initiatives to promote considerate behaviours that foster a better living environment. Please give a round of applause to SKM.

Often, municipal matters cut across many domains and require collaborative efforts across community groups and agencies to find better solutions. For example, one of our winners is a team comprising Bishan East-Sin Ming Community Emergency & Engagement Committee (C2E), Bishan East Zone 1 Residents' Network, Bishan-Toa Payoh Town Council, NEA, PA, SCDF, and SPF. This team organised a contest where residents were encouraged to come together and declutter their corridors by removing potted plants and shoe racks. This initiative helps to promote a neater and more appealing living environment in Bishan. It is one of many examples of team efforts from our winners, who also include outstanding individual officers such as Lynn from PA that made a difference in leaning forward to serve our residents. Let me take this opportunity to congratulate all winners.

Celebrating MSO's 10th Anniversary

This year marks a special milestone as we celebrate MSO’s 10th anniversary. Since its establishment in October 2014, MSO has come a long way, working closely with government agencies, town councils and the community to create a better living environment for all. MSO was set up as the central office to coordinate and improve municipal service delivery, especially for municipal issues that were complex and involve multiple agencies. We worked with our partners to resolve municipal issues in a timely and efficient manner. We also developed strategies and processes to enhance overall service standards, and promoted best practices and knowledge sharing among agencies, among other roles.

Many of you are familiar with the OneService App which MSO launched in 2015. This one-stop App allows residents to provide municipal feedback without having to know which agency to contact. To date, the OneService App has more than 620,000 users who have submitted more than 2.5 million municipal feedback cases. We have received favourable feedback that the OneService App is easy and convenient to use, and more importantly, it is effective in resolving municipal issues reported by users.

In 2021, MSO rolled out the OneService Kaki Chatbot, another convenient channel for residents to report issues. Using Artificial Intelligence (AI), feedback is automatically routed to the agency in charge of the issue based on the case description and geo-location submitted by the user. Both channels have since become residents’ go-to channels for submitting feedback on municipal issues.

TRANSFORMING MUNICIPAL OPERATIONS

Moving forward, MSO will continue to work with our partners and the community to pursue our vision of “One Service, An Engaged Community for a Better Living Environment”. This will be achieved through 3 strategic thrusts:

First, to drive transformative change in municipal operations and service delivery;
Second, to enhance the use of data analytics and operations-technology; and
Third, to forge stronger partnerships with residents and the community.

First, transforming municipal ops. MSO has taken bold steps in trying new approaches to address municipal issues, ensuring that service delivery will be faster, better, and more seamless for residents.

For example, the integrated municipal ops pilot in Tampines and Pasir Ris-Punggol towns has re-organised and streamlined common municipal services previously delivered by multiple contractors, now under a single operator. Municipal workers were also crossed-trained to take on adjacent tasks. Complemented by operations-technology, this has resulted in a more productive workforce.

We will also be piloting a dedicated team, the Community Relations Unit (CRU), which will be equipped with investigation and enforcement powers to better address severe neighbour noise and hoarding cases. A team of officers is working with partner agencies to develop its operational protocols. CRU will be part of an inter-agency effort to enhance the Community Disputes Management Framework, aimed at strengthening the community’s ability to maintain harmony amongst neighbours. We’re in the middle of the legislative process for this and I’m heartened that media reports about the CRU have garnered very favourable responses from the public.

These efforts will enhance the Government’s ability to respond to and resolve municipal issues. MSO will continue its pathfinder role to identify complex municipal issues and work closely with agencies and town councils to trial good solutions.

Leveraging Data

Second, leveraging data. We have seen how effective data mining and analysis can be in enhancing government operations and inform policy-making process. To this end, MSO shares actionable data insights, such as case volume trends and forecasts with agencies. We also provide agencies with regular updates on residents’ satisfaction levels, and cases that take longer than usual to close. These insights have helped agencies gauge the effectiveness of local interventions and better address recurring issues.

MSO will further strengthen its sense-making capabilities by diversifying and expanding its data sources. For instance, sensors with visual analytics capability can potentially be fitted on operations personnel and technology to autonomously collect real-time ground data. Such data will provide additional data points to complement resident feedback data to enable more in-depth analysis and better sense-making. Consequently, this will engender faster detection and thereby, swifter responses.

MSO will also explore ways to facilitate access to municipal feedback data by the wider community. We aim to promote better understanding and appreciation of municipal issues on the ground, and hopefully, spark innovative community-led solutions among residents to tackle municipal issues in their neighbourhoods. I am looking forward to seeing more community-led projects as we make data more accessible, further enhancing our collective ability to address municipal challenges.

Partnering the community

Third, and very importantly, partnering the community. Over the years, MSO’s role has evolved beyond coordinating and improving feedback case management to enabling community action and civic participation. We have facilitated workshops and provided funding support for ground-up projects to encourage community-led action on municipal issues. Our engagement efforts have also promoted positive social norms and considerate behaviours among residents.

In recent years, MSO has further embraced the spirit of collaboration through the formation of the Community Advisory Panel (CAP) on Neighbourhood Noise. The CAP, comprising community stakeholders with relevant experience and expertise, has engaged more than 4,400 members of public to establish what are considered acceptable and unacceptable noise disturbances, and recommend community norms that residents should adopt to manage noise disturbances. In fact, much of the CAP’s work has also found its way into the soon-to-be-enhanced Community Disputes Management Framework. This is indeed very substantive and tangible work coming from the community.

Another case in point is the Alliance for Action (or AfA) on Norms for Joss Paper Burning, a cross-sector collaboration involving stakeholders from the community, cultural experts, businesses and government, which embarked on a multi-year public education campaign to raise awareness on responsible joss paper burning. The AfA has focused its public education efforts on the two burning periods - the 7th Lunar Month and Chinese New Year. Some of you would have watched the Liu Lingling music video entitled "Sincere can already", which shared best practices about joss paper burning and encouraged residents to be considerate when doing so during this year’s 7th Lunar Month public education campaign.

As a result of the AfA’s steadfast and sustained efforts, feedback related to improper and irresponsible joss paper burning has steadily declined. For instance, the feedback volume has dropped by 12.1%, from 2,700 cases in 2023 to 2,372 cases in 2024 for this year’s 7th Lunar Month campaign, and a 31% decrease from 2021, which was before the AfA was set up. These are remarkable outcomes, and I would like to thank all community stakeholders for the efforts that they have put in. I’m sure for them, it’s a very satisfying experience to see their ideas and efforts translate into lower feedback volume and good responses from the community.

The Institutes of Higher Learning are also our key knowledge partners when it comes to adopting a science-based approach in developing effective solutions on the ground. I am pleased to announce that MSO and Temasek Polytechnic (TP) have just signed a Memorandum of Understanding to equip community stakeholders with information, skills, and resources to support ground-up efforts that improve the living environment.

For instance, MSO and TP will soon publish a toolkit for residents and the community who wish to address municipal issues in their neighbourhood but are not quite sure how to do so. The toolkit will contain, among other things, information on tried-and-tested solutions, and MSO’s Love Our ‘Hood funding support. I would like to thank Mr Peter Lam, Principal and CEO of TP, and his team for their strong partnership with MSO.

The strategies I have mentioned above are about expanding and improving our toolkit for handling municipal issues. We especially need to do this because Singapore’s demographics are rapidly evolving, with an ageing population, decreasing household sizes and increasing urban density. These changes are reshaping the nature of municipal issues we face collectively. On the one hand, we anticipate a higher demand for elderly-friendly infrastructure and more accessible public spaces. On the other hand, we are seeing linkages between trends like social isolation and loneliness with the incidence of harder-to-resolve municipal issues such as hoarding and pigeon feeding. By investing in ops tech, community-based solutioning and sense-making, we can be better equipped for present and future challenges in the municipal space.

As part of MSO's 10th anniversary celebrations, I am happy to announce that MSO will present tried-and-tested solutions to tackle frequently encountered municipal issues to ground volunteers. Each Citizens’ Consultative Committee will be invited to choose one solution to tackle a municipal issue in their estates, with MSO’s funding support. More details will be shared with the PA grassroots network shortly.

As we partner the community to raise the level of involvement of residents to help upkeep your estates, MSO has also developed a profiling tool to identify residents’ profiles in the municipal context. We completed the Resident Archetypes Study in May 2023 which showed that over one-third of Singaporeans belong to a resident profile called ‘Champion Charlie’. These are residents who are willing to resolve municipal issues personally as a first step and are open to come up with solutions to resolve neighbourhood issues.

Many of you have already tried the profiling tool before the start of today’s event – and I would not surprised to know if there are many ‘Champion Charlies’ amongst us today! The self-profiling tool, which is also available on MSO’s website, will help agencies understand the profile of our volunteers and residents better, and tailor our engagement efforts accordingly.

Moving forward, MSO will continue to champion pro-social norms and considerate behaviours by activating the community. In line with Forward SG’s objectives, we believe that residents play a critical role in the upkeep of their neighbourhoods. MSO’s initiatives will empower residents to take greater ownership by supporting them with funding and capability building. Home is where the heart is. When you go home, you want to see that your neighbourhood is clean, and that your environment is liveable and sustainable. Everyone has a part to play in enhancing our living environment.

Conclusion

As we celebrate MSO’s 10th anniversary and recognise today’s MSA winners, we stand at an important juncture, ever closer to our vision of “One Service, an Engaged Community for a Better Living Environment”. Our journey over the past decade has been a remarkable one and has been made all the more meaningful because of your support. The journey ahead, with our three strategic thrusts as our anchors, will also be very exciting for all of us to collectively enhance our living environment.

Once again, let me extend my congratulations to all MSA winners and I wish MSO and all our partners here a very happy 10th Anniversary.