As hawker centres resume dining-in, enforcement action will be stepped up over the coming weeks to ensure safe management measures will be implemented in the interest of public health and safety.

Firm action will be taken, even for first-time offenders

Senior Minister of State for Sustainability and the Environment Amy Khor said in a Facebook post on June 18 that firm action will be taken against breaches, even for first-time offenders.

Khor said dining-in at F&B establishments is a "higher-risk activity", so it is important to adhere strictly to safe management measures, which include keeping a safe distance in queues, keeping face masks on when one is not eating or drinking, keeping to groups of two, and no intermingling between groups.

Support for hawkers

Khor said that the ministry will continue to support stallholders in hawker centres and markets managed by National Environment Agency (NEA) or NEA-appointed operators by extending rental waiver and subsidies for another month.

As part of the support provided to help offset the impact from Phase 2 (Heightened Alert), new cooked food stallholders with tenancies starting on June 1, 2021, will receive half a month of rental waiver.

Stallholders are also eligible for one-off support under Covid-19 Recovery Grant (Temporary), NEA added in a statement to Mothership.

The agency added that there was an average of 16 termination of cooked food stalls per month in 2020, and a monthly average of 18 terminations for the first five months in 2021.

This is fewer as compared to the average of 28 terminations per month over 2017 to 2019.

The terminations are not concentrated in any one region, NEA added.

This suggests that the support measures for hawkers in the past year have been effective.

In 2020, the government provided five months of rental waivers and three months of subsidies for table-cleaning and centralised dishwashing services to help more than 6,000 stallholders at hawker centres managed by NEA or NEA-appointed operators, NEA said.

Getting more hawkers onto online delivery platforms

Moving forward, the government will look into helping to get more hawkers onto online delivery platforms as e-ordering is likely to become more popular and part of Singaporeans' way of living.

Currently, more than 3,000 out of the 6,000 plus cooked food stallholders are on board WhyQ and Grab, NEA said. Others could also be on platforms such as Oddle, foodpanda and Deliveroo.

Top image via NEA/FB