Hansard, Monday, 1 November 2021

1 Dr Tan Wu Meng asked the Minister for Health (a) whether the Ministry is aware of any employers in the healthcare sector which at any time in the past three years have specified or indicated to their employees that their taking of medical leave may affect performance assessments or bonuses; (b) what is the Ministry’s assessment of such practices given the COVID-19 pandemic; and (c) what recourse is available to workers who encounter such practices.

2 Ms Poh Li San asked the Minister for Health with regard to the discharge of COVID-19 positive patients who required oxygen supplementation or were warded in intensive care units in August and September 2021, what is the proportion of such patients who (i) have fully recovered and (ii) suffer from long-term health consequences, with the breakdown according to patients who were unvaccinated and partially vaccinated or fully vaccinated respectively.

3 Ms Jessica Tan Soon Neo asked the Minister for Health what further measures are required to reduce the number of serious cases and deaths from COVID-19.

4 Mr Lim Biow Chuan asked the Minister for Health (a) what is the reason for the increased number of deaths due to COVID-19 over the last two months; and (b) what more can be done to reduce deaths among both vaccinated and unvaccinated residents.

5 Dr Shahira Abdullah asked the Minister for Health what percentage of vaccinated patients who died from COVID-19 have underlying conditions which are actually well-controlled.

6 Mr Melvin Yong Yik Chye asked the Minister for Health (a) what is the percentage of staff in our public healthcare facilities who will not be able to clear their accumulated annual leave for 2021; (b) whether this is a significant increase as compared to 2020 and 2019; and (c) whether there are plans to help frontline healthcare workers take a break from the prolonged fight against COVID-19.

7 Mr Sharael Taha asked the Minister for Health (a) what are the main underlying conditions that resulted in the COVID-19 fatalities; and (b) whether individuals with underlying conditions are monitored and treated separately when they are infected.

8 Ms He Ting Ru asked the Minister for Health (a) how many days of leave have been taken by hospital healthcare and allied staff each month since January 2020; (b) what steps will be taken to minimise and reduce leave being cancelled for such staff due to capacity issues; and (c) whether there can be mandated mental well-being off days for healthcare staff such as that announced by Tan Tock Seng Hospital recently.

9 Mr Yip Hon Weng asked the Minister for Health in light of recent reports about manpower crunch in healthcare due to increase in COVID-19 cases (a) whether he can provide an update on the current healthcare manpower crunch; (b) what is being done to protect healthcare workers' physical and psychological well-being; and (c) what are the plans to provide relief to healthcare workers if the current situation is prolonged.

10 Ms Mariam Jaafar asked the Minister for Health whether the Ministry tracks the average number of hours worked monthly by nurses in public hospitals (excluding those who are required to self-isolate) and, if so, what is the data for the past month.

Mr Speaker, may I have your permission to answer Question Nos 1 to 10 as part of a Ministerial Statement delivered on behalf of the Minister for Health later in this Sitting?

Please do.

Thank you, Sir.

11 Mr Liang Eng Hwa asked the Minister for Trade and Industry (a) what is the current state of the retail electricity market; (b) what are the reasons why iSwitch Energy decided to exit the energy retail business; (c) what will be the impact to consumers and businesses; and (d) how can electricity be kept affordable for households and businesses.

12 Ms Poh Li San asked the Minister for Trade and Industry (a) what is the impact of the energy supply crunch in China and India on electricity prices in Singapore; (b) what are the Energy Market Authority’s strategies to cushion the impact of the international energy supply crunch on the stability of energy supply and electricity prices in Singapore; and (c) whether additional assistance will be given to low-income families to cope with the rise in electricity prices from 1 October 2021, if such rates increase were to continue beyond 31 December 2021.

13 Mr Murali Pillai asked the Minister for Trade and Industry following the recent collapse of several electricity retailers (a) what is the Ministry’s assessment of the business viability of the remaining electricity retailers; and (b) what steps will the Ministry take to maintain a competitive electricity market in Singapore.

14 Mr Edward Chia Bing Hui asked the Minister for Trade and Industry given the recent pull out of iSwitch Energy from the open electricity market (a) what is the Ministry’s current risk assessment of more retailers exiting the market due to the increases in the price of gas; (b) whether the current recourse options for consumers are sufficient and satisfactory should more retailers exit; (c) whether the Ministry is considering a longer notice period for retailers when they choose to exit the market so that consumers are better safeguarded; and (d) what are the critical success factors to ensure the continued success of Singapore’s open energy market.

15 Mr Vikram Nair asked the Minister for Trade and Industry whether any steps will be taken to prevent or make it more difficult for electricity retailers to avoid their obligations to customers by withdrawing when the energy markets move against them.

16 Ms Ng Ling Ling asked the Minister for Trade and Industry (a) whether electricity retailers are required to report their financial status regularly; (b) whether the Ministry monitors their financial health to ensure operational viability; (c) whether there will be a review on the number of energy retail licences needed to sustain the open electricity market; and (d) what are the plans when Singapore’s long-term piped gas contracts with Indonesia start expiring beyond 2023.

17 Ms Jessica Tan Soon Neo asked the Minister for Trade and Industry with the recent rise in electricity prices and the exit of two electricity retailers (a) whether there will be support for consumers especially lower-income households given the increase in reliance on digital and work-from-home arrangements; and (b) what measures are in place to ensure that Singapore’s power supply remain stable and reliable.

18 Ms Sylvia Lim asked the Minister for Trade and Industry (a) what are the causes of the sharp fluctuation in the spot prices of electricity since July 2021; and (b) based on the experience since inception of the Open Electricity Market (OEM) to date, what is the Ministry's assessment of the continued viability of the OEM for households.

19 Ms Joan Pereira asked the Minister for Trade and Industry regarding the exit of some suppliers from the retail electricity market (a) what assistance will be provided to affected households and companies which will face unexpectedly higher tariff rates; and (b) whether the SP Group can honour the rates for which affected customers had contracted with the electricity retailers.

20 Ms Foo Mee Har asked the Minister for Trade and Industry (a) what is the Government’s assessment of the vulnerability of the current model of electricity retailing; and (b) what measures can the Government take to help moderate the impact of higher energy prices on residents.

21 Mr Gan Thiam Poh asked the Minister for Trade and Industry in view of the discontinuation of electricity retailers from the open electricity market (a) whether the Ministry will review the requirements for licensing electricity retailers, such as assessing their paid-up capital, financial means, risk management and compliance measures; (b) what is the recourse for consumers and whether retailers are legally obliged to compensate consumers for early termination; and (c) whether the Ministry will consider licensing financial institutions as electricity retailers as they have the resources and are under strong governance and supervision by the authorities.

22 Mr Melvin Yong Yik Chye asked the Minister for Trade and Industry (a) whether the recent exits of iSwitch Energy, SilverCloud Energy and Ohm Energy due to the volatile global electricity market are a sign that the Open Energy Market (OEM) retailers have been too aggressive in their pricing to attract customers; (b) whether the Ministry will be doing a review to determine the optimal number of retailers in the Open Energy Market; and (c) whether there are plans to include more measures to better protect consumers from sudden exits by the OEM retailers.

23 Miss Cheryl Chan Wei Ling asked the Minister for Trade and Industry given the recent withdrawal of electricity retailers (a) whether the future business model of electricity retailers will be reviewed to ensure that they are sustainable; (b) whether the Ministry will consider different selection criteria for new electricity retailers; and (c) whether the Ministry will assist families who may be impacted by the increase in electricity prices when helping them transit to more energy efficient appliances.

24 Ms Tin Pei Ling asked the Minister for Trade and Industry (a) whether the SP Group will continue to honour the prices and terms of existing contracts between the private electricity retailers who recently quit the Open Energy Market and their affected users until the contracts’ expiration; and (b) how will this series of exits affect the intended liberalisation of the energy market in Singapore.

25 Mr Shawn Huang Wei Zhong asked the Minister for Trade and Industry (a) with the rising cost of energy worldwide, what are the measures taken to secure the country’s access to energy; and (b) what are the measures taken to ensure that energy remains affordable to businesses and households in Singapore.

26 Mr Shawn Huang Wei Zhong asked the Minister for Trade and Industry (a) what is the root cause of energy retailers’ exit from the market; (b) what is the impact to businesses and households; and (c) what are the additional measures taken to ensure a stable energy market.

27 Mr Liang Eng Hwa asked the Minister for Trade and Industry (a) amid the current global fuel supply crunch and price volatility, what are its near- and longer-term implications on our energy security and affordability; (b) what are the measures and contingency plans in place to ensure energy supply reliability and resilience; and (c) whether current generating capacity can meet the electricity demand in the coming years.

28 Mr Sharael Taha asked the Minister for Trade and Industry (a) how many electricity retailers are currently left in the market; (b) what measures will the Ministry put in place to ensure that there is a viable business left for the remaining retailers and the market remains competitive; and (c) whether there will be assistance provided to affected household and companies who may now face higher tariff rates.

29 Mr Gerald Giam Yean Song asked the Minister for Trade and Industry regarding the recent exit of several electricity retailers from the open electricity market (a) how many households are expected to have their contracts transferred back to SP Group in the next few months; (b) what is the expected increase in electricity prices they will face with this change; and (c) how is the Ministry assisting households negatively affected by these changes.

30 Mr Gerald Giam Yean Song asked the Minister for Trade and Industry (a) what are the reasons for the recent curtailment of piped natural gas (PNG) from West Natuna; (b) what other disruptions to PNG supplies have been experienced in the past six months; (c) whether Singapore has had to use its reserves of liquified natural gas; (d) how long will these reserves last under current conditions; and (e) how is the Ministry exploring alternatives to natural gas for power generation.

Mr Speaker, may I have your permission to answer Question Nos 11 to 30, as well as Parliamentary Questions (PQs) by Dr Lim Wee Kiak1,2, Mr Desmond Choo, Mr Lim Biow Chuan3 and Mr Alex Yam4 that have been scheduled for a subsequent Sitting?

Please do.

Thank you. Mr Speaker, the global energy market is facing a conflation of four shocks: first, an unexpected surge in demand as economies begin to recover following the easing of COVID-19 restrictions; second, unusual weather events have impacted the generation of wind and solar power in Europe; third, lower than expected coal production, notably in China; and fourth, a series of gas production outages around the world.

The shocks have been most intensely manifested in the market for natural gas, which is a fallback fuel for electricity generation in many, many countries. As a result, spot gas prices have risen by around five times, since March 2021.

Many major economies across Europe and Asia have low inventory levels and are moving quickly to secure sufficient fuel supplies for the winter. These have compounded the impact on prices of fuel and electricity around the world.

Members of this House are understandably concerned. We have received 28 PQs on energy-related matters. Let me bucket them into three groups: (a) energy security; (b) electricity retailers; and (c) electricity prices.

First, on energy security. Singapore relies on imported natural gas for almost all our electricity production and is therefore highly exposed to global supply and demand shocks.

Over the years, we have put in place measures to secure Singapore’s access to fuel supplies.

Since 1999, we have had long-term supply contracts for Piped Natural Gas (PNG) from Malaysia and Indonesia. Negotiations to renew some of these contracts are ongoing. By and large, the supply of PNG has been relatively stable. However, due to an incident at the upstream gas production facility in July this year, West Natuna’s gas supply to Singapore has been affected resulting in a fall in overall gas supply by about 3% since September 2021. This is likely to last until the end of 2021 as the facility undergoes repair and upgrading. Gas pressure of the supply from South Sumatra has also been affected due to higher demand from gas users upstream. The Energy Market Authority (EMA) is working with the gas importers to stabilise the PNG supply.

In 2013, we supplemented PNG with Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) by building an LNG terminal. This allows us to tap gas sources further afield and is part and parcel of our diversification strategy. The LNG terminal has sufficient capacity to meet all of Singapore’s gas needs should PNG be unavailable. Earlier this year, EMA also appointed two new term LNG importers, bringing the total number of term LNG importers in Singapore to four. Gas users in Singapore now have more options to procure the gas they require.

We also require power generation companies, or gencos, to stockpile at least 60 days of fuel reserves, in the event of disruptions to our natural gas supply. The stockpile remains intact.

In addition, EMA ensures that there is sufficient generation capacity to convert the fuel to electricity. Taking into account planned and unplanned outages, we need to maintain spare generation capacity or reserve margin of at least 27% above peak electricity demand. Today, the reserve margin stands at 52% – still significantly above 27%. Over the last 10 years, the excess capacity had been higher, mainly due to over-investment by private gencos in the early 2010s. Going forward, we cannot always assume that the private sector will put in sufficient investments to build new generation capacity, even as the margin narrows over time. I will touch on how we intend to address this though the Energy (Resilience Measures and Miscellaneous Amendments) Bill tomorrow.

In short, we have sufficient fuel supplies and generation capacity today.

However, given the unprecedented scale of this energy crunch, we are leaving nothing to chance. EMA has been working closely with industry stakeholders on pre-emptive measures to further secure Singapore’s fuel and electricity supply and ensure energy resilience and reliability.

First, we have established standby fuel facilities which gencos can draw upon if needed to generate electricity. This will bolster the gencos' reserves.

Second, to complement the standby fuel facilities, EMA has informed gencos to contract sufficient fuel to at least meet their customers’ demands.

Third, in the extreme event that gencos are not willing to draw on gas reserves to generate electricity – perhaps due to risk aversion – EMA will engage the gencos directly to generate electricity using fuel from the standby facilities.

Details of these measures are in EMA’s press release on 19 October 2021.

Members of the House, these pre-emptive measures are extraordinary, but they are also necessary to secure our fuel and electricity supply during this extraordinary period. EMA will review if these measures are still needed by 31 March 2022.

Mr Speaker, over the longer term, we will continue to diversify our energy sources, where possible.

We have announced that we will quadruple our solar deployment by 2030, to generate at least two gigawatt-peak (GWp) of electricity.

We also announced last week that we will be importing up to four gigawatt (GW) of low-carbon electricity by 2035. While this was primarily a move to decarbonise the power system, it will also reduce our reliance on natural gas.

Beyond this, we will continue to explore other low-carbon alternatives like hydrogen and geothermal energy.

Collectively, these measures will make our power system more resilient and less susceptible to price and supply risks.

I will now touch on the electricity retailers. Since the 2000s, EMA had progressively liberalised the electricity retail market. Electricity retailers buy electricity through the wholesale electricity market (WEM) to sell to consumers. They were generally able to offer prices which were priced lower than the regulated tariff in the last few years, because wholesale electricity prices were depressed below the long run marginal costs due to overcapacity in generation, and oversupply of gas. The Electricity Futures Market (EFM), set up in April 2015, also enabled retailers to hedge their price risks through electricity futures. Retailers can also offlay their risk to gencos through financial hedges such as Contracts for Differences (CfDs). These have worked well in a stable market environment. With the nationwide launch of the Open Electricity Market (OEM) in 2018, household consumers were able to benefit from greater choice, competitive pricing and innovative offers with no change to the reliability of their electricity supply.

However, market conditions today are significantly more volatile than in 2018. Some market participants had not anticipated this and were not sufficiently prepared. Over the last three weeks, five electricity retailers – iSwitch, Ohm Energy, Best Electricity, UGS, SilverCloud Energy – have announced their plans to leave the market. These five retailers supply to about 9% of all electricity consumers.

Members are understandably concerned about why retailers are exiting the market. Let me explain.

First, several retailers were under-hedged when the global energy shocks and disruptions to our PNG supply caused wholesale electricity prices to spike. These retailers now find themselves having to buy the unhedged portion of electricity at the high wholesale electricity prices and sell them at much lower contracted rates to consumers.

Second, liquidity in the electricity futures market has also been affected. Given the huge volatility, market makers were not prepared to take on significant positions. This is similar to the situation in other commodity markets.

As a result, some electricity retailers are no longer able to sustain their operations in this challenging environment and thus, have chosen to exit the market.

Mr Speaker, the entry and exit of retailers are features of an open and competitive retail market. The unusually high number of exits reflects the severity of the global energy shock. We have observed the same phenomenon in other countries, such as the UK as well as Spain.

The key is to have a fair and robust system to ensure a smooth transition for customers affected by exiting retailers.

Retailers who wish to exit the retail electricity market are required to first approach other retailers to take on those consumers at the same terms and conditions. Failing which, the consumer will be transferred to SP Group. As of end October 2021, about 140,000 households and 11,000 business accounts will either be transferred to another retailer, or back to SP Group. Consumers who are transferred to the SP Group can choose to purchase electricity from another retailer.

Security deposits from household consumers are safeguarded and will be refunded after offsetting outstanding charges. Retailers are not allowed to charge customers an early termination fee.

There will be no disruption to electricity supply. EMA will direct consumers who wish to seek compensation or file claims under their supply contracts with the retailers to the available channels.

Given the current challenging circumstances, EMA is open to allowing retailers facing challenges to suspend their operations by transferring their customers to SP Group while they strengthen their business. In exchange, these retailers commit to provide an ex gratia payment to ease their customers' transition. Best Electric, Ohm Energy and UGS Energy have joined this arrangement.

EMA is working closely with the remaining nine retailers who are still operating in the Open Electricity Market (OEM).

EMA is facilitating their efforts to hedge against future price volatility. These include facilitating the sale of electricity futures contracts between retailers that are exiting the retail market to those that are staying.

EMA is also working closely with SGX to incentivise more market makers to participate in the electricity futures market.

Some Members of Parliament have asked if SP can continue to honour the prices and terms of the existing contracts that affected customers had contracted with their electricity retailers. The transferred households will need to pay the same regulated tariffs as all the other households and small businesses. This reflects the price SP pays to the gencos for the electricity. Thus, for the transferred customers to pay less, the other consumers with SP will have to pay more than the regulated tariffs to cross-subsidise them.

A few Members have asked what the recent exit of retailers portend for the OEM. Allow me to make three points.

First, the benefits of the OEM remain. Notwithstanding the recent exits, the OEM has benefited and continues to benefit many Singaporeans. Since it was launched in November 2018, consumers have been able to enjoy increased choice and flexibility when buying electricity, ranging from fixed-price plans, discount-off-tariff (DOT) plans, or even wholesale electricity price plans. More importantly, consumers who switch to retail price plans have been able to enjoy savings of up to 30% off the regulated tariff. To date, about half of all households, or about 746,000 households accounts, have switched to buying electricity from electricity retailers.

Second, the viability of OEM remains. There are currently nine remaining retailers in the OEM. Depending on the severity and the duration of this energy crunch, more retailers may either exit or they may re-enter the market. Members have asked whether EMA will be reviewing the number of electricity retail licensees needed to sustain the OEM. Mr Speaker, the answer is that there is really no magic number. There is sufficient competition in the OEM today and EMA is committed to ensuring this.

Last but not least, the foundations of the OEM will need to be strengthened. Today, OEM retailers are vetted and have to satisfy a stringent set of requirements before they are licensed to serve OEM consumers. For example, retailers have to demonstrate that their management team possesses the relevant experience in energy retailing or trading, they have to consistently hedge at least 50% of their wholesale electricity price risk and they have to submit financial statements to EMA, which allows EMA to monitor their financial health.

In hindsight, these are necessary but for a severe stress test such as this, the measures were insufficient. This is the current crisis that we are facing today. Some retailers were ill-prepared to weather the storm. Members have raised useful suggestions on how we can further strengthen these requirements and the futures market. We will consider them carefully. Thank you.

Mr Speaker, let me now turn to the third key issue, and that is on the electricity prices. I wanted to thank the Members for giving us more suggestions. But now on electricity prices.

I thought you were teasing us!

Singapore imports our energy needs and cannot be fully insulated from developments in the global energy market.

Most consumers in Singapore have been cushioned somewhat so far. Ninety-nine percent of household consumers are on standard price plans with retailers or the regulated tariff rate and about 96% of businesses are on fixed price or discount-off-tariff plans. These have risen by far less than the price of gas or wholesale electricity.

However, the sustained high fuel prices will eventually feed into our electricity bills to reflect the cost of electricity production.

Many Members of this House have asked what the Government will be doing to help affected households and businesses. The Government will provide focused and targeted assistance to eligible groups of consumers. Eligible households will continue to receive U-Save rebates to support them with their utility expenses. MTI will also work with MOF to monitor the situation and study whether further assistance is required for affected households and businesses.

At the same time, we are also conducting programmes to raise awareness of electricity conservation and facilitate efforts by households and businesses to reduce their utility bills. For example, SP Services has been progressively replacing households’ analogue electricity meters with advanced electricity meters which allow them to track their energy consumption through the SP Utilities mobile app. This will help households better understand their electricity usage patterns and encourage them to be more energy efficient.

NEA has also launched other energy saving initiatives such as the Climate Friendly Households Programme to encourage households to switch to more resource-efficient appliances. Eligible households are given vouchers to offset the costs of these appliances. We urge all consumers to use energy prudently and adopt energy conservation as a way of life.

In conclusion, Mr Speaker, Sir, our energy market has served us well for the last 20 years. Amongst major cities, our electricity supply is one of the most reliable and price competitive. Our market is now being tested by an unprecedented storm in the global energy market. While most consumers will not see an immediate increase in electricity prices, they may see an increase next year with increasing energy prices globally. Our commitment to this House is this: we will secure our energy supply. We will help vulnerable consumers weather the storm. And we will continue to make our energy sector even better.

Thank you and I look forward to your continued support.

Mr Liang Eng Hwa.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. First of all, I want to thank the Minister for his reassuring reply on how we are going to deal with the ongoing energy crunch and volatility. My question is going to be on the electricity retailers.

In the light of the current disruptions, as the Minister said, some retailers are ill-prepared for this current volatility, would the Government still recommend consumers to switch to the retail price plan? That is my first question.

The second question is, while the OEM has indeed brought significant savings to households in the last few years – having discounts over the regulated rates and so on – does the Government see the need to review this, review the regime, given the situation that we are facing now, perhaps to have fewer, but stronger and more regulated retailers? Or just having one, Singapore Power, but offering different price plans so that they can benefit from the scale efficiency.

I thank Member Mr Liang Eng Hwa for his question. The OEM provides choices to consumers, notwithstanding the recent volatility, electricity retailers continue to offer competitively-priced retail price plans to interested consumers. Affected consumers who have switched back to the regulated tariffs, actually still have the option of choosing from other retailers that are able to suit their needs. And we encourage all consumers to study carefully, deliberate over which electricity price plan would best suit their needs.

On the viability on the OEM, in my main reply, I think it still remains but we will need to continue to explore ways and means to strengthen the foundations. My Ministry will study how we can further strengthen the safeguards for the OEM, so as to better protect our consumers' interests.

Ms Poh Li San. If I can request Members to keep their questions short and no more than two supplementary questions, please.

Thank you, Speaker. I thank Dr Tan for his comprehensive reply. I have one question: if the supply crunch continues to worsen over the next few months, in the longer term, then, what is MTI's strategy to reduce the national consumption, the demand, especially from industries, the sectorial angle.

I thank Ms Poh for her question. I think we have been constantly engaging the industry. Earlier and through the past year, I have mentioned that underlying the four switches of what we have been preparing for, underlying it is energy conservation. We also want to encourage industry to consider using energy in a more efficient manner, because obviously there are peak demands and there are off-peak demands. And we hope that the industry will work closely with all of us in making sure that we can space out the peak demand versus the trough.

What is important is that as we look at securing our supply – I think it was announced in the 19 October press release by EMA – in terms of the supply, we have sufficient supply. In terms of how we procure the gas prices, we are also looking at means of exploring other longer-term measures: importing low-carbon electricity, importing from the regional grid are some of these strategies. We are also exploring, as a much longer-term strategy, to reduce our reliance on importation and that would be to look at our solar power generation capacity.

At the same time, we are also looking at working with academia, the different institutions, as well as industry leaders in how we can access low-carbon hydrogen, carbon capture utilisation and storage as well.

So, we have a combination of all these measures to reduce our reliance on any one particular supply of energy.

On top of that, we are also exploring the use of energy storage systems in the form of batteries to see how we can provide a more stable power supply to reduce the intermittence from solar energy. I hope that answers the question.

Ms Jessica Tan.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I have a related supplementary question for the Minister in terms of energy stability as well as security. Today, 95% of Singapore's electricity still comes from natural gas. The Minister talked about the pre-emptive measures of stockpiling as well as enabling the standby fuel facilities for gencos to be able to use this capacity. But from the high prices that we have seen for natural gas, how sustainable is this measure? I know that it sounds like supply is sufficient, but how sustainable is this, given the consumption and the heavy reliance on electricity?

At the same time, my second supplementary question is on the status of the genco supply and generation capacity. Does EMA monitor this and what is the current status of this capacity as well as that supply?

I thank Ms Jessica Tan for her questions. All generation companies will need to comply with our requirements to have a fuel stockpiles that will last at least 60 days of operation. Generation companies should utilise their own fuel supply to meet electricity demand and only tap on the standby fuel facilities when needed. The standby fuel facilities are necessary to ensure we have sufficient fuel in Singapore to meet our electricity demand. Hence, we took the pre-emptive step in mid-October to secure this.

EMA will continue to review the need to maintain this facility once the global energy situation stabilises. So, to reassure Ms Jessica Tan and Members of the House, our generation capacity is sufficient.

Ms Foo Mee Har.

Thank you, Speaker. Minister has noted that the regulatory requirements for our Open Electricity Market (OEM) are probably inadequate to withstand a severe stress situation such as the current one. He identified four key things that are culminating to a perfect storm.

I would like to ask Minister two supplementary questions. First, how will the Government address the vulnerability of the current regulatory framework for the long-term sustainability of the OEM? I guess this was designed and I guess we did not expect this perfect storm. So, specifically, what is the time frame you will be rolling out a new enhanced framework; anything on the hedging strategy, anything about the financial strength of the OEM?

The second question is whether the Government will consider, in the meantime, special support to the remaining electricity retailers for their continued operations and also most importantly, their commitments to the consumers. So, how are those who are still surviving, including SP, going to manage the influx of the new customers, which it will now have to serve?

I thank the Member, Ms Foo, for her very pertinent questions. Indeed, there is a cost to regulation and this cost ultimately would be borne by consumers. If the requirements are too onerous, then fewer retailers may be willing to participate in the market. Therefore, if there are fewer retailers, there will be less choice and there will be less competitive plans for consumers.

Prior to the current energy crunch, our prudential requirements were largely adequate. We put in place safeguards to protect consumer interests, such as safeguarding the deposits of households and also the minimum hedging requirements of 50%. In addition, retailers and their shareholders know that if they should exit without regard for their customers' interests, they may not be granted retail licences henceforth.

Thus, over the last decade, up to 2020, only five other retailers have left the market and many of them cited the intense market competition as the main reason for their exit. This demonstrates that our safeguards in the past would have probably sufficed not just in our market, but in most market conditions. This episode, this unprecedented crisis, has highlighted some learning points for us.

EMA will enhance the licencing requirements for the OEM retailers and strengthen protection even more for consumers moving forward. However, we have to be also practical and realistic when instituting safeguards because it would be neither feasible nor economically prudent for us to institute safeguards that can cover every potential possible eventuality. Doing so would lead to significant costs for consumers.

On the measures that SP is taking to manage the influx of new consumers which it must now serve, the objective of shifting consumers back to SP is to ensure that there is no break in electricity provision. SP has put in place measures to make the transition for affected customers and consumers as seamless as possible. This transition back to SP is fully automated and the affected consumers do not have to take any action. SP will also follow up with consumers, post the transition, with an email or letter notification, informing them of the transfer. Affected consumers who wish to remain with SP, do not need to take any further action. Consumers are also free to switch out to other retailers thereafter.

Ms Sylvia Lim.

Thank you, Speaker. I have one supplementary question for the Minister concerning whether he has any interim data to share on the customers who have been affected by the exit of the independent retailers? What I mean is, since the exit of iSwitch and others, their customers would have to make certain decisions. From those announcements till now, can Minister share whether most customers who are displaced have decided to stay with SP for time being or have they switched to the larger retailers who are also generators called gen-tailers? Or have they actually taken the plunge to go with another independent retailer? I wonder if he has that data.

I thank Ms Sylvia Lim for her question. I think the short answer is that I do not have the data because it happened quite recently. But I think we will monitor her question as posed. In fact, we have every intention to do so. And perhaps at the subsequent Sitting, if she can file another PQ, we would be quite happy to update her.

Mr Alex Yam.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Related question under the Code of Conduct for retail electricity licensees, retailers are required to approach other retailers to attempt to novate their customers on the same contractual terms. I hear from the previous answer to the hon Sylvia Lim that you do not have the current numbers on how many would possibly be able to novate. But a follow-up question is, how would the regulator EMA, in this case, ensure that the code is adhered to by those retailers who are exiting the market, so that these negotiations do carry on and benefit the end consumer.

The next is related to the ex gratia payment that Minister had mentioned and which was also in the EMA press release. Details are a bit scant on this. How would the retailers be getting in touch with their customers, in terms of possible ex gratia payment to ease the transition? Those are my two questions.

I thank Mr Alex Yam for his two questions. In part of my earlier reply, I said the retailers will work with EMA and they will, of course, work with other retailers. And as a last resort where SP comes in to take over that, in the form of a regulated tariff, there is a sequence and a mechanism to it.

Suffice to say, today, that what EMA will do is that they will continually work with existing retailers to ensure that the transfer is seamless and to also ensure that there is a fair code of practice being adhered to. Thus far, the novation has happened fairly seamlessly. There are existing retailers that are still in the business and I think that everyone is watching the situation quite carefully as well. So, the storm continues to evolve. I think the stability that we have provided is that very pre-emptive move to make sure that the supplies have been fortified. We have made sure that the supply of gas for the generation of electricity is actually ensured, so that our reliability and our resilience is preserved. Tomorrow, I would be also putting up a Bill, the Energy (Resilience Measures and Miscellaneous Amendments) Bill. We probably would have more points put in there to ensure that our resilience continues to be reinforced.

Mr Edward Chia.

Thank you, Speaker. I would like to ask the Minister if there are instances, where OEM retailers elected to pre-terminate contracts, despite partially hedging purchase prices – and I think Minister mentioned 50% – and by doing so, walk away with a larger windfall by selling the hedge prices in the current wholesale market at the expense of consumers? And if so, what powers does EMA have to ensure consumers are fairly treated?

I thank Mr Chia for this question. Thus far, EMA has not received any complaints from consumers about the OEM retailers pre-terminating their contracts. I would like to assure this House that in awarding a retail electricity licence, as I have alluded to earlier on, EMA would first need to be assured that the licensee has the requisite management experience and track record in electricity retailing, and they are not some fly-by-night companies out to make a quick buck and walk away when the prices of electricity or prices move against them. This applies even to the retailers that have already exited.

This round, the crisis was unprecedented and there are significant challenges to retailers because they were not sufficiently hedged. While they may have some existing hedges which can be unwound, some of the retailers have suffered significant losses this round over the last few months. Because, the hedging is, I think we require them to maintain 50% hedge, so, because they were not fully hedged, therefore, that swing, the huge volatility swing has resulted in them suffering significant losses.

We will learn from this particular episode. Ostensibly, we cannot possibly predict and pre-empt every single episode as I have shared earlier on in my answer to Ms Foo's PQ. If we covered every single instance of volatility, up to the different standard deviations, it would be very, very costly for us and not tenable. But we will make use of this opportunity to learn from it and also study how we can further strengthen and tighten it. I hope that gives the Member the reassurance.

Mr Gerald Giam.

Sir, I have two supplementary questions: one on energy security and another on electricity prices. How much leverage does EMA have over foreign gas suppliers to ensure that disruptions and low pressure do not become a regular occurrence, for example, through the imposition of liquidated damages? And have these levers being exercised so far?

Secondly, a larger proportion of customers who never switched electricity retailers are from the lower-income households. About 79% of 1-room to 2-room households versus just 40% of landed property households. This is from data from a PQ I asked in January. This means that the lower-income group has been paying elevated regulated tariff prices for several months already. Will the Government consider a special one-off additional electricity rebate to assist these lower-income households during this difficult period?

I thank Mr Giam for his questions. Let me try and answer his second question first. For the lower-income households, we have the vouchers for the U-Save rebates which effectively help them in terms of the utility bills. I have shared also in my earlier statements, either during Committee of Supply 2021 or in some of my earlier Parliamentary speeches that, the 4-room HDB flats and for the 3-room HDB flats, the rebates amount to about six months of rebates per year, and I think for some, four months per year. So, the low-income households are the ones that we are also very, very concerned about.

Notwithstanding the rebates that are already in existence, we are also exploring with MOF further means to help. I am not at liberty at this particular point in time to release further details, because obviously, we are still working out the details with MOF.

So, to summarise, the low-income households get a higher proportion of the U-Save vouchers compared to other types of households.

In terms of the global gas situation, the Member asked about what kind of leverage we have. There are contractual obligations, if they are not able to supply the agreed amount of gas, there are compensation benchmarks. In terms of other negotiations, as to how we talk to other suppliers and so on, I think because it compromises our energy security and it also compromises our negotiation powers, at this particular point in time, I am not at liberty to share them and I hope you understand.

Mr Saktiandi Supaat.

Mr Speaker, thank you. I thank the Minister for his answers earlier. I have got two supplementary questions. First, the Minister mentioned just now about trying to enhance consumers' reduction of their energy consumption to manage their costs while also allowing us to achieve our climate goals. What more can the Ministry do to enhance this even further, in terms of letting consumers manage their costs through reduced energy consumption?

The second question is related to what Member Mr Gerald Giam asked. I am very concerned about the affordability of electricity prices. Consumers can no longer enjoy the very competitive prices under OEM, compared to the regulated tariffs. So, the question is, in the worst-case scenario of retailers falling to zero – we do not want that to happen, but if it falls to zero from nine currently – do we have to go to U-Save rebates for vulnerable families going forward many times, given the volatility of the markets? And if it is triggered, what more can we do to other groups, rather than just the vulnerable groups? Are there certain segments that we can help, beyond the vulnerable segments, to weather the storm?

I thank Mr Saktiandi for his question. The regulated tariffs reflect the long-run marginal cost of generating electricity. For a period of time, the electricity retailers were generally able to offer prices lower than the regulated tariff because the wholesale electricity prices were depressed below cost due to the over capacity in generation and oversupply of gas. And I think I did intimate to Members of the House, in fact, I gave a very strong point earlier this year that that low prices are not sustainable and that it will go. What we can try to do, very, very hard, is to try to mitigate and manage the gradient of that growth.

We import all of our electricity, 95% of our electricity, more than that is through natural gas, which is imported. Even if we do go into low-carbon electricity, we will still have to import, because geographically, we are naturally disadvantaged. Even if I were to cover all the rooftops of the HDB flats, the JTC buildings with solar panels – we use vertical solar panels today and we cover our floating reservoirs, all the vast expanse of space – we probably can generate maybe at peak, well not at peak, but probably between 4% and 5% or 6% of our needs. So, we still have to import the rest of it.

So, I think the Member's point about how do we — I mean, the way I have underscored it is really about energy conservation. The Government will continue to support the low-income households through all these vouchers and rebates and so on. But I think whether we like it or not, as the demand and supply situation continues to tighten, the gap between the open electricity market and the regulated tariffs will continue to narrow.

The OEM is not just simply about offering our consumers discount off regulated tariffs. More pertinently, it offers a variety of fixed price plans and variable price plans to our consumers so that they can select the plan that best suits their needs.

In fact, the only sustainable way looking forward and one of those things that I have been preaching constantly is that we would strongly encourage all Singaporeans to adopt energy conservation as our way of life. We can start small. We can turn the lights off when we are not in the room. We can opt to use the fan more often rather than using air-conditioning. We can, in air-conditioning rooms, push the temperature up by a few degrees, we do not have to bring it down so low and wear a sweater. And switching to more energy-efficient appliances where possible. And I think that NEA has worked very well with us to put the ticks for appliances. Minister Grace Fu is here. The more ticks, the more efficient the appliances in terms of conservation of energy.

So, I hope that with every single bit, we can all come together and help. We are also committed to a low carbon footprint moving forward. I think you have read in the news today about what is happening in Glasgow and UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) and how this global warming is going to create catastrophic disastrous consequences for us if we do not lower our carbon emission. So, I hope that with that collective effort, we can all come together and make this a greener and a lower energy-requiring environment to live in.

31 Mr Pritam Singh asked the Minister for Manpower (a) why was a foreign embassy able to respond more quickly than the dormitory operator or the Ministry with the provision of aid and support to foreign workers residing at the Westlite Jalan Tukang Dormitory; (b) what acts can be ascribed to the dormitory operator or other stakeholders that resulted in the unsatisfactory conditions at the dormitory; and (c) whether there are sufficient resources deployed to ensure minimum standards of hygiene, food quality and medical support at all foreign worker dormitories in Singapore.

32 Mr Edward Chia Bing Hui asked the Minister for Manpower given the recent issues highlighted at the Westlite Jalan Tukang Dormitory, how will the Ministry be holding the dormitory operators and their corporate clients even more accountable for delivering an acceptable level of care to our foreign workers.

33 Mr Desmond Choo asked the Minister for Manpower (a) what are the findings on the allegations of poor living conditions at Westlite Dormitory at Jalan Tukang; (b) what actions has the Ministry taken to rectify the issues; and (c) what are the measures taken to prevent similar issues in other dormitories.

34 Mr Leong Mun Wai asked the Minister for Manpower (a) what is the overall vaccination rate for all dormitory residents; (b) what is the vaccination rate at the Westlite Jalan Tukang Dormitory; and (c) what proportion of Chinese workers living at the Westlite Jalan Tukang Dormitory have been vaccinated before they arrived in Singapore.

35 Mr Leong Mun Wai asked the Minister for Manpower (a) with regard to the Westlite Jalan Tukang Domitory, whether there is non-segregation of workers who tested positive for COVID-19, substandard quality of food provided and lack of access to medical support; and (b) if so, who will be held responsible for these lapses in the migrant workers’ living conditions.

36 Mr Dennis Tan Lip Fong asked the Minister for Manpower (a) what were the main reasons for the unhappiness of foreign workers at the Westlite Jalan Tukang Dormitory leading to the unrest on 12 October 2021; (b) what measures have since been taken by the Ministry to ensure that conditions have improved and that the previous conditions will not recur; and (c) whether any action will be taken against the dormitory operators, employers of the workers or service suppliers for any neglect or omission.

37 Mr Dennis Tan Lip Fong asked the Minister for Manpower (a) whether the Government will review its current stay-in requirements for workers in dormitories who are infected with COVID-19, bearing in mind that such accommodation typically requires a number of workers to live in close proximity when sharing dormitory rooms and common facilities like toilets, bathrooms and wash basins; and (b) whether such accommodation may allow for easier virus transmission as well as promoting anxiety and fear of infection among those sharing the same rooms.

38 Mr Gerald Giam Yean Song asked the Minister for Manpower (a) what are the reasons for the delays in isolation and treatment of COVID-19 infected workers, the extensive cross infection of workers, the serving of food unfit for consumption and the relatively low vaccination rate of workers at the Westlite Jalan Tukang dormitory; (b) what enforcement action will be taken against the operators, employers or food caterers; and (c) whether the Ministry has received and acted upon similar complaints from workers in other dormitories.

39 Mr Leon Perera asked the Minister for Manpower (a) what is being done to monitor and evaluate the quality of food catered for migrant workers, including nutritional value and cultural appropriateness, food hygiene and safety standards; (b) on average, what is the time gap between production and consumption of such food; and (c) what enforcement actions have been taken against employers who fail to comply with the requisite food standards.

Mr Speaker, Sir, several Members have filed questions relating to the situation at Westlite Jalan Tukang Dormitory and with your permission, Sir, may I ask to take Question Nos 31 to 39 together, please?

Yes, please.

Let me first explain the healthcare and recovery protocol for the dormitory residents to set the context. In line with the shift to the Home Recovery Programme in our community, the dormitories have phased in a Dormitory Recovery Programme since 2 October in the transition towards "living with COVID-19". Ninety-eight percent of dormitory residents are fully vaccinated and most are below the age of 60. A vast majority of recent infections are asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic.

Forty-five larger dormitories now have dedicated blocks or rooms set aside within their compounds as Dormitory Recovery Facilities (DRFs). COVID-19-positive vaccinated workers who are asymptomatic or only mildly symptomatic can recuperate and be monitored in DRFs while being segregated from other workers. Additionally, we have set up three Centralised Recovery Facilities (CRFs) in the larger dormitories to cater for workers who do not have access to the 45 DRFs. The 45 DRFs and three CRFs together have a total of 11,000 recovery beds. We will expand these recovery capacities if needed.

We have also aligned testing protocols in the DRFs and CRFs with the rest of our community. Workers who test negative on their supervised Antigen Rapid Tests (ARTs) after 72 hours of isolation can be discharged. Workers are given thermometers and oximeters to monitor themselves three times a day and report these numbers. A recovery buddy is designated in each room to help with the dissemination of information and to monitor the health of fellow migrant workers. The dormitory operator also checks on them regularly.

So far, over 17,000 workers have gone through the Dormitory Recovery Programme and have safely recovered. The majority were discharged by Day 7 and about half of them were discharged by Day 4. The small minority who developed symptoms continued to have access to medical support through daily sick parades at our regional medical centres or telemedicine consultations which are available 24/7. Mobile Clinical Teams may also be deployed to DRFs or CRFs with high report sick rate to augment access to primary care. In fact, fewer than 0.2% needed to be admitted to the hospital.

The workers appreciate the convenience of dormitory recovery since they can return quickly to their rooms on discharge and resume work very rapidly.

Let me now give an account of the events at Westlite Jalan Tukang Dormitory. This dormitory has about 3,000 residents. About half of them are employed by Sembcorp Marine and almost all of them are newly arrived workers from China in the last three to four months. These workers were offered vaccination under our national vaccination programme, with a small number taking it up. The employer has since clarified that these workers had been vaccinated in their home country before arriving in Singapore. The vaccination status of these workers needed to be verified through a serology test and WHO-EUL vaccination documentation before we can register them as being vaccinated in Singapore. MOM has been working with the employer to expedite the verification. Progress has been made. To date, about 60% of the Sembcorp Marine workers have been verified to have received WHO-EUL-approved vaccines, while a number have not been vaccinated with WHO-EUL vaccines and we encourage them to be vaccinated in Singapore for their own protection.

Following the implementation of the Dormitory Recovery Programme on 2 October, the dormitory operator began adjusting to these new protocols. On 10 October, there were 174 newly detected Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) and Antigen Rapid Test (ART) positive cases. However, the dormitory operator had difficulty processing the sudden surge of workers that needed to be conveyed. The next day, on 11 October, some key members of the dormitory staff did not come to work as they themselves had tested positive. The Assurance, Care and Engagement Group or ACE officers on the ground stepped in on that day to assist the operator.

In response to the sharp increase in the number of COVID-19 cases on 10 October, Sembcorp Marine and ACE carried out a mass testing exercise on 12 October at the worksite and dormitory which yielded another 278 COVID-19-positive cases that needed to be conveyed from the dormitory to a CRF if they were vaccinated, or to another appropriate isolation facility if they were unvaccinated. This happened while the team was trying to process the previous surge, and the dormitory operator struggled to process the high volume. While ACE officers tried to assist the operator between 11 and 12 October, it, too, did not put in enough resources during this time to triage, process and convey the COVID-19-positive workers before the second surge on 13 October.

Sir, following the incident on 13 October, ACE took swift actions since that afternoon to stabilise the situation.

First, we doubled the number of officers to manage the conveyance of all infected workers from the dormitory such that, by the evening of 13 October, about 70% of the workers needing conveyance had been sent to the appropriate recovery or isolation facilities. By the next day, on 14 October, the backlog was cleared.

In addition, ACE officers, together with the employer and dormitory operator, engaged the workers and assured them that their feedback would be looked into and there would be timely conveyance of infected individuals. The workers calmed down and returned to their rooms.

ACE also deployed a mobile clinical team to the dormitory to augment the existing medical services that were already available to the residents at Westlite Jalan Tukang Dormitory through the regional medical centres and telemedicine. All those who wanted to seek medical attention were seen by the medical team on site on the same day. This helped to reduce the waiting time and allay much of the fears and anxieties that the workers experienced.

The situation has been calm in the dormitory since 13 October. Over the following days and weeks, ACE officers, together with the employer and dormitory operator, continued to be at the dormitory every day to engage the workers. In fact, over the last two weeks, ACE has introduced more videos and infographics to better explain Singapore’s strategy for dealing with COVID-19 and the recovery process in our dormitories, in view that the newly-arrived workers at the dormitory were used to a different COVID-19 management strategy in their home country. In particular, there are now videos of migrant workers sharing their recovery journey and assuring their fellow migrant workers, as well as videos of doctors answering common questions from migrant workers in their own native languages.

So, I urge employers and dormitory operators to do more to help our workers adjust to the new normal, communicate changes that will affect workers’ well-being and actively address potential knowledge gaps of their workers and residents. We also call on workers who are not vaccinated or not verified – if they are vaccinated overseas – to complete their vaccination or verification as soon as possible as this will protect them from serious illnesses. MOM and sector agencies will monitor this progress.

We also saw many of our partners coming in to support the workers after the incident on 13 October. We are very grateful and encouraged by the outpouring of support by the Chinese business community, the Chinese Embassy, NGOs like HealthServe, Migrant Workers' Centre and the wider community. This is testimony to the civic-mindedness and big-heartedness of our community here in Singapore. Thank you so much for your help!

This is similar to how, at the height of the pandemic last year, MOM worked with the High Commissions of India and of Bangladesh, as well as various NGOs to support our migrant workers, including celebrating festive occasions with them. We thank all parties for their contributions and donations, and we will continue to work together to care for our migrant workers.

Workers also raised concerns about the quality and hygiene standards of food provided by Sembcorp Marine. We take this very seriously and have asked the employer to address the complaints. The employer has reported that they have made improvements to the food and the feedback from the workers has been positive. The Ministry will not hesitate to take actions against any errant employer who fails to ensure workers' access to safe food. The Singapore Food Agency is also investigating the food safety practices of this particular caterer.

Sir, in summary, there were shortcomings by all parties. On the employer's part, workers were upset and had raised issues about food quality and hygiene. On the dormitory operator's part, they struggled to cope with the surge in numbers. On ACE's part, we stepped in but did not put in sufficient resources in time to resolve the problem.

Following the incident, all parties have diligently addressed the issues, restored calm to the dormitory and to the workers. We have also conducted a thorough review and tightened up the processes, especially for escalating and calling in more resources to deal with a surge in cases that need to be conveyed. ACE has also tightened up coordination and communication with dormitory operators and employers when handling mass testing exercises and a surge in cases. Investigations into failures to fulfil regulatory obligations, for example, in food safety and hygiene issues, are ongoing.

All parties across our more than 1,300 dormitories, whether it is dormitory operators, employers and ACE officers on the ground, play important roles to support the recovery of our migrant workers. More than 17,000 migrant workers have recovered under the Dormitory Recovery Programme with the support and hard work of all these partners. We will learn from this episode and continue to strengthen the partnership with all stakeholders and community partners to ensure the well-being of our migrant workers as we transit into endemicity.

Mr Pritam Singh.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I would like to thank the Senior Minister of State for his comprehensive reply to my Parliamentary Question (PQ). I have a question pertaining to MOM's ACE Group, which was a new division set up last year, taking over from the inter-agency task force, and it pertains to the deployment of forward assurance and support teams. It would appear from the Senior Minister of State's chronology that, between 10 and 12 October, there were gaps. Can I seek confirmation from the Senior Minister of State as to the manpower situation within ACE itself, whether there are enough individuals and teams to cover not just this particular dormitory but the vast number of dormitories in Singapore?

My second question pertains to the first part of what the Senior Minister of State shared with regard to the Dormitory Recovery Programme. I would like to seek an update from the Senior Minister of State as to what is the situation with the various pilots that I believe were launched to allow workers to reintegrate into the public space and whether this can actually be moved along in a more deliberate manner. I understand from individuals in HealthServe that mental health concerns are becoming more noteworthy.

Sir, the Member asked two questions. The first one is on whether we have enough ACE officers to cover the number of dormitories we have. The reality is that we have 1,300 dormitories, big and small. There will never be enough to go around on a regular basis, to plant people in all 1,300 dormitories. How we go about doing this is to leverage the partnership we have with our stakeholders: the dormitory operators, the employers and, of course, we have volunteers within the migrant worker community, the friends of ACE, where they are also ambassadors, where they are migrant workers themselves who have been here for some time. They are trained and equipped with some of the basic knowledge to share information with their fellow workers, to help spread the message and also to help to collate feedback and channel this upwards to all of us. So, in a way, it is about leveraging the multiplier effect of everyone pitching their hands in and working together.

As the Member will appreciate, to have operations within 1,300 dormitories, big and small, with different phases perhaps of infection, of liberalisation of going to the community or going to work. The work necessary to coordinate across all the different stakeholders as well as to ensure that when a case is detected; documentation of the COVID-19-positive result; churning out a nominal roll, a name list; communicating the need for conveyance and then for the team to arrange for the necessary transportation; having also the receiving party at the other end, at the dormitory recovery facilities (DRFs) or the centralised recovery facilities (CRFs), for example, is a necessary complex process that involves quite a bit of communication and coordination.

So, we do make sure that our ACE officers are prioritised in terms of going to the dormitories that need help rather than have them spread thin over all the many places. In a way, it is about risk-strategising and prioritisation. At this moment, we are working with what we have. When there is a need to, if there is a real major surge in demand that we need to augment our numbers, we will look at increasing the number of ACE officers that we need to deploy.

The second question pertains to how much more we can do in liberalising community visits for our dormitory workers. I must say that our dormitory workers have been very, very patient and they have actually gone through a lot in the last one and a half years or so.

In the past month or so, we have started a community pilot: visits for workers to go into the community. We started with about 500 and then, with the success of that pilot, you will see in today's newspaper that an announcement has been made over the weekend. Minister Tan See Leng himself visited one of the Hindu temples with many of our migrant workers. And we are going to increase that number to 3,000 workers a week, especially with this festivity of Deepavali coming along, many of them will be looking forward to community visits as well.

Progressively, as we stabilise the dormitory recovery process, as the community also gets adjusted to Home Recovery Programme, as we move more and more into the endemic state, I believe that we can gradually reopen with a lot more numbers to allow our workers to access more community facilities.

We are also liberalising the number of times our vaccinated workers in the dormitories can go to the recreation centres as well. So, there are less restrictions going to recreation centres. That, again, offers another outlet for them to access services, to also have the necessary interactions that they need at the recreation centres, on top of the community visits that we are liberalising.

Mr Desmond Choo.

Thank you to the Senior Minister of State. I have two supplementary questions. The first one is, MWC has been working with MOM to help the management of dormitories. For this particular incident, why were the other agencies or NGOs not brought on board to support ACE for that few days? Is it linked to certain critical priorities that MOM might have?

The other supplementary question is on the vaccination of these workers. I know there is a requirement to bring in only vaccinated workers. So, in this instance, why were certain numbers of workers not vaccinated? How can we prevent and enhance the arrival of such unvaccinated workers for future batches?

Mr Speaker, I thank Mr Desmond Choo for these two questions. On the first question relating to why the NGOs were not brought in earlier, let me explain that when the surge in cases occurred, the topmost priority in the minds of our ACE officers who went in on 9 and 10 October was to augment the dorm operators, the topmost priority was really to do the processing and to do the triaging of those who may have need for medical care. On 9 October, a mobile clinical team was deployed onsite to help cope with the load of increased number of residents who might need medical attention or seek consultation. So, the priority there was very clear. It is about making sure that our team on the ground focused on what is the most urgent need and that was to take care of the medical conditions – make sure they are well, make sure they are safe medically, first.

The next priority then was to ensure that we can stitch the logistics together and make sure there is enough conveyancing capacity to bring these workers to the necessary isolation facilities.

That situation with COVID-19 cases going up in the dorm, it would not be appropriate to allow NGOs to be exposed to the risk of infection in a dorm like this. Because the work then was about medical care, was about conveyancing. It is not necessarily something that the NGOs have the capability to provide as well.

Therefore, that is the reason why in the first few days, our ACE officers were working with resources we have with the dorm operators to make sure that these important needs are met.

When the situation had calmed down – after 13 October, by that night, as I said, 70% had been conveyed; and by the next morning, by 14 October, all the rest of the backlog had been cleared – this was when the rest of the NGOs came in. In fact, the Embassy came in only on 14 October, for example, to also provide some of these supplies like masks, hand sanitisers. These were useful as a psychological boost for our workers; but by themselves, they would not be able to address the medical needs. So, it is quite clear from the sequence of events, the team was on the ground early on to try and manage the medical situation.

As to the second question of why there were so many so-called unvaccinated workers coming to Singapore, you must remember that this happened when the workers came in three, four months ago. The earlier batches came in at about mid-July and then, another bulk of them came in at around August. At that time, we were still in the "zero COVID-19" situation. We were trying to contain the numbers., but we had imposed Not to Land (NTL) on some of the high-risk countries. For low-risk countries, we did not impose NTL for them. China is one of those countries where they have very low COVID-19 numbers and we did not impose NTL on China workers coming in at that time.

At that time also, our dorms were not into the endemic posture, and so, even if the workers turned out not to be vaccinated, there was a way to keep them safe. But in this process, by October, we were transiting to more of an endemic posture. Those workers, who came in earlier on when we were still pursuing a zero-COVID-19 type of strategy, were therefore caught in that transition if their vaccination status was not up to the mark in terms of personal protection.

That is why we are encouraging both the workers and employers to get this thing sorted out as soon as possible and for those who are yet to be vaccinated, to get them vaccinated.

Members would also have read from our previous announcement that from today, 1 November onwards, only work pass holders who are fully vaccinated will be allowed to enter Singapore for work. This would be an adjustment that we are making from today onwards, in line with our endemic posture to make sure that anybody who is applying for a work pass, we make sure that they are vaccinated before allowing them to come in.

So, this is a gap that will gradually narrow over time. We are now digesting the group of people who came in just before that, who may then have a certain vaccination gap that we need to fill.

Mr Leon Perera.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, Sir. I thank the Senior Minister of State for his answers. I have two supplementary questions just on food quality. I know SFA is investigating the food quality claims around this particular incident. But in general, on food quality for migrant workers, there have been concerns about this going back for years. There was a survey, for example, in 2015, that talked about how the majority of workers felt the food was unsatisfactory, unclean and so on. There have been improvements since then.

Two questions. Firstly, SFA has regulations that govern the quality of catered food supplied locally to Singaporeans and I know there were revisions to these rules in March 2020 to require food establishments providing catering services, to have CCTVs to keep retention samples of the food and so on. So, do those SFA guidelines for catered food supplied to Singaporeans also apply to catered food supplied to migrant workers? Is that applicable, is that enforced?

Secondly, what is being done, in general, to look at the standards of food supplied to migrant workers beyond just the Jalan Tukang incident; in particular, around what you hear and frequent reports about the food being prepared the day before and there can be a long period of time that elapses between when the food is prepared and when it is consumed by the migrant workers?

Sir, I do not know how the Member can get the feedback from these workers for years and years when they all just arrived in July this year. So, I am not sure whether such a claim is absolutely correct that this complaint has been going on for years and years. These workers have been here for less than four months.

Regulations that apply to dorm caterers, yes, I think it is a standard that we apply across to all catering, whether it is to the dorms or for other public consumption.

Regarding feedback for standards of food hygiene, there are various avenues in which the workers can feed back. First, we have now the FWMOMCare app, which is an app that all foreign workers can download onto their smart phones. Through this app, they can feedback directly to MOM, to ACE, for example, on any issues relating to their dorm conditions, including food. So, that is something through which workers have direct access to our agencies. The second thing is that there are volunteer groups, NGOs who are in regular contact with our workers – what we call Friends of ACE – when they are organising activities, when they interact with the workers, this is again another channel of feedback.

I must say our NGOs are very, very much pro-workers. They will not hesitate to tell us when there is any feedback that they receive regarding sub-standard accommodation or food.

The third is that the Migrant Workers' Centre (MWC) has established a network of what we call Migrant Worker Ambassadors who are scattered throughout all the different dormitories. These are foreign workers themselves, staying in the dormitories, who have been here in Singapore for many years; some of them, even for a decade. They are quite familiar with the setting, they are quite familiar with the standards that are to be expected on a day-to-day basis and they again, form another channel of feedback to the relevant authorities and to the NGOs as well, if standards were to drop.

The final one is that MWC runs a hotline where all foreign workers who face challenges and they cannot get through to the employers or to anyone else, can call this hotline where they can directly give feedback to MWC as well as the ambassadors who speak their native languages to collate all the feedback.

So, I think there is no shortage of feedback. Clearly, some of these things, if there were language barriers, we need to look into that. In this case, I think they were very much newly arrived workers, they may not be exactly familiar with many of these resources opened to them. This is where we need to communicate to them that there are avenues they can seek redress from. We will also take this chance to impress on all employers that it is their responsibility and their obligation to make sure that they provide food of decent quality and hygiene standard that their workers can consume.

If there are investigations that show that employers have actually violated any of these obligations, we will take them to task.

40 Mr Muhamad Faisal Bin Abdul Manap asked the Minister for Home Affairs (a) which Singapore Police Force (SPF) units were activated in the Jalan Tukang Westlite Dormitory incident; (b) what are their roles; and (c) whether any enforcement actions were taken at site by these respective units.

41 Ms He Ting Ru asked the Minister for Home Affairs (a) over the last five years, how often and under what conditions have the riot police been deployed to respond to an active situation in Singapore; and (b) whether the situation at the Jalan Tukang Westlite Dormitory on 13 October 2021 warranted their deployment.

Mr Speaker, may I have your permission to answer Question Nos 40 and 41 together, please.

Yes, please.

On 13 October 2021, the Police responded to a call for assistance at the Jalan Tukang Westlite Dormitory. The information was that a group of workers were behaving aggressively, with potential for violence.

Patrol officers from Jurong Police Division were dispatched to the dormitory. Officers from MOM were already engaging the workers. The officers from Jurong Police Division together with the dormitory staff and officers from MOM managed to resolve the situation. While the Jurong Police Officers were engaged, they also assessed that it was necessary to have other Police units on standby, in the event the situation became violent. And additional units were placed on standby. However, these additional units were not needed to be deployed. No arrests were made by the Police during the incident.

The Police do not track the number of times that its contingency forces have been activated to respond to public order incidents. Such activations may take place in a variety of situations, including management of large crowds that may turn disorderly, protests or riots.

As a reply to Ms He Ting Ru’s question on previous deployments to active situations in the last five years, officers from the Special Operations Command (SOC) were activated in response to public order incidents on two occasions: at the Singapore Boys' Home in September 2016 and September 2018.

Mr Faisal Manap.

Thank you, Sir. I would like to thank the Minister of State for the reply from MHA. I just want to know whether apart from the SOC, what are the other units being deployed, as I had asked in my Parliamentary Question?

I thank the Member for the question. The Police deploy their forces based on the nature and the scale of the incident. Different units will be activated and deployed for different purposes depending on the situation for each case. We generally do not disclose the kind of units and any other details that are related to the operation.

The following question stood in the name of Mr Ang Wei Neng –

42 To ask the Minister for Transport whether Singapore is considering accelerating Vaccinated Travel Lane (VTL) arrangements with more territories, especially those with lower COVID-19 infection rates such as Australia, China, Hong Kong and New Zealand.

43 Mr Kwek Hian Chuan Henry asked the Minister for Transport whether the Ministry will consider increasing the quota for passengers from Vaccinated Travel Lane (VTL) flights given that VTL flights are from countries with similar risks and that the adult passengers are already vaccinated and tested multiple times prior to entry.

Mr Speaker, Sir, may I have your indulgence. My reply would take a little bit longer than the allotted time.

Yes, carry on.

Mr Speaker, may I have your permission to take Question Nos 42 and 43 on the vaccinated travel lane, together?

Yes, please.

I also would like to address similar questions on this subject that have been filed by Mr Saktiandi Supaat1, Mr Louis Chua2, Mr Gerald Giam3, Mr Shawn Huang4 and Mr Dennis5 Tan for subsequent Sittings.

I want to start by taking stock of where we are in terms of border reopening.

Members would be aware that MOH has established a risk-based categorisation of countries and regions. This framework is based on its public health assessment of a country or region’s COVID-19 situation, including its infection rate and vaccination coverage.

Countries and regions in Category I are of the lowest risk. Currently, this includes Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. These are countries and regions which continue to adopt a "zero-COVID" approach, and which therefore continue to have very low COVID-19 incidence rates. To Mr Ang Wei Neng’s question, we have already opened our borders to all travellers from these countries unilaterally. They can enter Singapore quarantine-free and only need to undergo an on-arrival PCR test. To Mr Gerald Giam’s question, we do not require the visitors who arrive from these Category I countries and regions to be vaccinated.

Countries and regions in Category II are of a similar incidence rate to Singapore or lower. Since 8 September 2020, we have reopened to vaccinated travellers from some of these countries in a cautious and calibrated manner through the Vaccinated Travel Lanes (VTLs). We started the VTL scheme with two countries, namely Brunei Darussalam and Germany, and have since extended it to eight others. We have also announced the commencement of VTLs with Australia and Switzerland from 8 November, and with the Republic of Korea from 15 November. In total, we have launched VTLs with 13 countries, which is a fraction of the countries that Changi Airport was connected to pre-COVID-19. Collectively, they accounted for about 15% of Changi’s annual passenger arrivals pre-COVID-19.

Mr Henry Kwek, Mr Saktiandi and Mr Louis Chua have asked about the quota and designated flights for the VTLs, and how these are distributed.

We set an overall quota for the VTL scheme as a safeguard to manage the public health risk. The quota is allocated to airlines operating flights to and from VTL countries based on the plans they submit. The allocation for each country and airline can vary based on demand, but the total will be kept within the overall quota. The airlines can only carry eligible passengers on the designated VTL flights. The Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore (CAAS) monitors the airlines closely to ensure their adherence to the stipulated measures and allocated quota.

The quota for the first 10 VTL countries is 2,500. When the VTLs with Australia, Switzerland and the Republic of Korea commence later this month, the total daily quota for all 13 countries on the VTL scheme will be increased to 4,000. This is about 5% of the total daily arrivals at Changi pre-COVID-19. There will be about 19 daily VTL flights from these 13 countries, with an average VTL quota of 200 per flight.

We will monitor the incidence rate and the proportion of imported cases closely, review the demand, before deciding on any further increases in the quotas.

Mr Ang Wei Neng, Mr Shawn Hwang and Mr Dennis Tan have asked about our plans to extend the VTLs to more countries and our criteria for doing so.

We are in discussions with several partners, including our regional neighbours, to reopen safely to each other. We hope to conclude these discussions soon and restore our connectivity with them. We will announce details when ready.

I would like to emphasise that in these early stages of reopening our borders, it is more important that we do it well rather than scale up fast.

We have therefore expanded the VTL scheme step-by-step, informed by the public health assessment of the country's or region’s COVID-19 situation, and also the operational risks and implications. This includes whether key safeguards under the VTL scheme can be effectively implemented, such as whether travellers from the VTL countries can present digitally verifiable and authenticated proof of vaccination as a precondition for entry. We work closely with MOH to regularly review safeguards such as the testing protocols based on the latest scientific evidence and testing technology. Even as we seek to reopen our border and restore connectivity with the rest of the world, safeguarding public health is our utmost priority.

Mr Saktiandi has asked whether the VTL approach is transitory and what my Ministry’s plans are for reopening our borders thereafter. Sir, the VTL scheme is a pathfinder to restoring general air travel, enabling us to establish the protocols for safe reopening to vaccinated travellers. We will progressively expand the scheme as we gain experience and confidence in reopening our borders safely.

Ultimately, our goal is to restore safe two-way quarantine-free travel with countries and regions from around the world. As part of "Living with COVID-19", we must be resolute and press on with the reopening of our borders, while staying vigilant with the essential public health safeguards. It is crucial to rebuilding and reclaiming our status as an international aviation hub. Much obliged, Speaker.

Order. End of Question Time. Ministerial Statement on behalf of the Minister for Health. Senior Minister of State Dr Janil Puthucheary.

[Pursuant to Standing Order No 22(3), Written Answers to Question Nos 49-51, 53, 56-57, 63-64, 66-68, 70-72, 74, 76-77, 79-88, 92-97, 99-102, 104-105, 107-113, 115-119, and 121-122 on the Order Paper are reproduced in the Appendix. Question Nos 44-48, 52, 54-55, 58-62, 65, 69, 73, 75, 78, 89-91, 98, 103, 106, 114 and 120 have been postponed to the sitting of Parliament on 2 November 2021.]

Mr Speaker, may I have your permission to deliver this Statement on behalf of the Minister for Health.

Please proceed.

Thank you, Sir. Sir, from today's Order Paper, I will address Oral Questions Nos 1 to 10 and Written Question No 40, as well as questions filed by Ms He Ting Ru, Assoc Prof Jamus Lim, Mr Liang Eng Hwa1, Mr Leong Mun Wai, Ms Mariam Jaafar2 as well as Mr Murali Pillai for future Sittings. Members may wish to withdraw the questions filed for future Sittings if they have had their questions addressed.

Sir, it has been five weeks since we entered the Stabilisation Phase. We had tightened restrictions to slow the growth in the number of cases and to further expand and stabilise our healthcare system. I would like to explain to the House the current situation in the Intensive Care Units (ICUs) and hospitals and address questions about deaths and severe cases from COVID-19. I have been meeting the clinical teams that run the ICUs, visiting them on site to go through operational details and speaking to their staff to understand the challenges that they face. These discussions and the insights shared are vital in helping us plan ahead should infection rates climb and severe cases increase.

As of yesterday, we have 1,672 COVID-19 patients admitted into our acute hospitals and they take up about 18% of hospital beds in our acute public hospitals. The occupancy rate of all our general ward beds is currently at about 90%. For isolation beds, it is now at 85%.

Of the COVID-19 patients who are hospitalised, the more serious cases will need oxygen supplementation. This number of cases continues to increase, with 284 cases currently needing oxygen support in the general wards.

The most serious cases need ICU care. The proportion of COVID-19 cases requiring ICU care is at about 0.3% today. Even though this is a small proportion, it translates into a large absolute number of ICU patients when case numbers are high and will place a serious strain on our ICU capacity.

There are currently 130 patients who are critically ill in the ICU. Some are intubated and require a mechanical ventilator. All of these patients require the continuous care of the ICU team. They occupy around 60% of the 219 ICU beds currently reserved for COVID-19 patients. These patients stay for an average of 11 to 15 days in the ICU and some stay for up to a month in the ICU.

Besides COVID-19 cases, there are also non-COVID-19 patients with life-threatening medical conditions who require ICU care, adding to the sustained load that our hospitals have to bear. Our public hospitals currently operate about 163 adult ICU beds for these patients, with an average occupancy of close to 80%.

In comparison, in 2019, before COVID-19 struck, we had 298 adult ICU beds, and the average occupancy rate was 63%. So, we have been reducing the non-COVID-19 ICU beds, in order to cope with more COVID-19 patients. This is one of the key trade-offs when we increase the number of COVID-19 ICU beds.

We have had to increase the total number of ICU beds to 382 for both COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients over the past two months. And the need to increase the capacity of our healthcare system is a heavy burden carried by the staff, our healthcare workers.

Already, our hospitals are feeling the manpower crunch. Signs of fatigue can be seen amongst our healthcare workers. It has been over 20 months of continuous daily battle against the pandemic. A large proportion of our healthcare workers have not had the opportunity to take leave since 2020 and over 90% of them will not be able to clear their accumulated leave for 2021. This is clearly a much higher proportion compared to the past two years. Our healthcare workers have gone and continue to go way beyond the call of duty to care for their patients. The hospitals are trying to minimise having staff work overtime. For the month of September, our nurses worked for an average of 160 to 175 hours per month.

I received a WhatsApp message from a senior member of the clinical teams. It says, "We are getting increasingly stretched, overworked and fatigued... We are uncertain how long we can keep this up. Morale is slipping." Another colleague sent me a WhatsApp message and it goes: "It feels like what started as a 2.4km run became a marathon and just as we are reaching the finishing line, we have to run a second marathon. Our people are exhausted physically, mentally, emotionally – whether they will admit it or not." I know this person as a professional colleague. I know both of them. Their roles to look after ICU patients also extend to looking after their staff, managing their teams, making sure that people are in a position and have the ability to perform at their best. So, when people like them say words like these, "exhausted physically, mentally, emotionally – whether they will admit it or not", I take it very, very seriously.

It is therefore not surprising to find resignation rates going up this year. About 1,500 healthcare workers have resigned in the first half of 2021 compared to about 2,000 annually pre-pandemic. Foreign healthcare workers have also resigned in bigger numbers, especially when they are unable to travel to see their families back home. Close to 500 foreign doctors and nurses, healthcare workers, have resigned in the first half of 2021, as compared to around 500 in the whole of 2020 and around 600 in 2019, about double the usual rate. These resignations were mostly tendered for personal reasons, for migration, or moving back to their home countries.

But it is also in such trying circumstances that we find stories of inspiration, stories of commitment to public service. On a recent visit to a COVID-19 ICU, I met a nurse who had been redeployed from her usual job in the Orthopaedic Department into the COVID-19 ICU. In the Orthopaedic Department, they look after bones, joints, muscles and she was now redeployed into a COVID-19 ICU. She had had a short training and orientation course, and then subsequently on-the-job training from her ICU colleagues. She is senior, she is a Nurse Clinician and an Advanced Practice Nurse, with many, many decades in public service. And although it is a challenge to work in a new environment and with a new set of equipment, drugs and protocols, because of her excellent fundamentals and her experience and resolve, she demonstrated confidence and competence in delivering care that the ICU patients need.

On the day I visited, she was looking after her first ever obstetric patient. After many years, this is her first ever obstetric patient, a young lady who had to have her baby delivered prematurely because of COVID-19 and was now needing treatment in the COVID-19 ICU, not in a post-natal ward. An orthopaedic nurse, deployed to a COVID-19 ICU, now looking after an obstetric patient. And there are many others like her, doctors, nurses, therapists, social workers – re-deployed to do what is urgently needed. And despite having to do difficult work in unfamiliar environments they have kept the clinical outcomes excellent, through hard work, professionalism, dedication and resilience.

But this is taking a toll. They are getting tired. They are carrying a burden of care that is sometimes unimaginable. Having to hold a phone for a patient so that the family can say their last goodbyes. Holding their patient's hand, to keep them company, on behalf of the relatives. They need all the support we can give them.

At MOH, we are redeploying manpower, to serve as healthcare or patient care assistants at our institutions. We are reaching out to more volunteers to join the SG Healthcare Corps and support this important work. We are collaborating with private hospitals to ease some of the load on our healthcare workers in our public hospitals. We are stepping up the recruitment of healthcare workers from overseas.

Our public healthcare institutions have also stepped up their outreach to staff to support them through measures that will safeguard their well-being, including counselling services, staff helplines and peer support programmes.

To Dr Tan Wu Meng's question about hospital departments factoring in sick leave as one of the indicators of work performance, there have previously been isolated incidents, but this practice has ceased. Healthcare workers who are concerned about the way sick leave affects their performance appraisals can approach their union, MOM or MOH for assistance.

Besides addressing the issues of manpower, we have also been working with public, community and private hospitals to set aside more beds for COVID-19 patients. We have also stood up COVID-19 Treatment Facilities (CTFs), which have close to 2,000 beds with an occupancy of 50% or less. We are continuing to add further capacity to our CTFs, with a view to reach around 4,000 beds in November.

We will expand our ICU capacity further, in preparation for a potential rise in severe cases. We are currently working with our hospitals to ramp up from 219 to 280 ICU beds for COVID-19 patients. These can be ready this week. If needed, our next expansion will be to 350 beds. We have been repurposing existing hospital wards, such as single rooms and isolation rooms, into additional ICU beds. We have been augmenting ICU manpower by deploying previously trained ICU staff to help with patient care. Non-ICU staff have also been brought in, as I described earlier, and they work under the supervision of ICU-trained staff. The shift pattern of nurses may have to be adjusted in order to cater to these needs and this has already started to happen in some hospitals. At the same time, we are also asking the private hospitals to set aside ICU beds to assist in managing both COVID-19 patients and non-COVID-19 patients who are critically ill.

Increasing ICU beds takes time and it affects regular hospital operations. Converting non-COVID-19 ICU beds for use by COVID-19 patients who need intensive care has a limit, as it diverts resources from non-COVID-19 patients who also need care.

The most important limit is the manpower required to staff ICU beds. Patients in ICU need trained staff, who must be able to provide individualised care, including round-the-clock monitoring and continuous care. So, any increase in ICU bed capacity must be supported by an increase in manpower, which has to be diverted away from non-COVID-19 ICU duties. Any redeployed staff or new hires would also have to undergo training to operate the specialised equipment and medical devices in the ICU to care for their COVID-19 patients.

Logistically, we can keep stepping up our ICU beds. We have ventilators, we have equipment, consumables, all the things that are needed, but not enough people. As a result, if we keep increasing our beds, we stretch and stretch our healthcare workers. We will come to the point that they will no longer be able to provide that continuous excellent care. Our nurse-to-patient ratio will also be lower, which means each nurse will have to take care of more patients than they do today. In a normal ICU – peacetime, pre-COVID-19 – one nurse would look after one or two patients. If she has to look after four, she will not have enough hands or time to provide the same level of care.

There will come a point where even as the healthcare professionals are doing their very best, they are trying their hardest, more patients will die.

And this will affect both COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients. As more healthcare resources are diverted to support COVID-19 services, our hospitals' ability to sustain regular non-COVID-19 services will be reduced.

So, while we may have plans to step up to a certain number of ICU beds, the real situation on the ground, the operational considerations, are not straightforward. We do not want to go anywhere near to this theoretical limit. If we do, the situation can easily get out of hand. It will affect the unvaccinated disproportionately, but it will also affect all the rest of us.

MOH has strategies to restrict the number of cases, not only to try to shield our healthcare workers and hospitals from the large surges, but also to protect all of us. We will continue to need care for heart disease, diabetes and cancer. We will have accidents and broken bones, and all of the patients, all of us, will need care, comfort and healing.

Our ICU staff have been stretched to their limit in the last two weeks. At its peak, we had 171 COVID-19 cases in ICU. But the situation has eased a little. Today, this has come down to 130. The booster doses have helped in reducing severe illnesses among vaccinated seniors, but the unvaccinated continues to be at risk. That is why we continue to monitor the situation very closely, especially the number of unvaccinated seniors who get infected. Every day, there are about 60 of them and six are likely to end up in the ICU. We need to keep this group as small as possible to ensure everyone who needs care can receive it.

Thankfully, because of our high vaccination coverage, almost all cases, about 99%, have had no or mild symptoms. We have also managed to keep our fatalities very low. But sadly, we have seen 407 deaths so far. Each death is a tragedy and a loss felt by the family, the patient's loved ones and the care team. Of these, 395 of them passed away in a hospital, eight at home and four in a care facility. The number of deaths has increased in the past two months as the overall number of cases increased.

Seniors who are unvaccinated and have underlying medical conditions are at much greater risk of severe illness and death. Close to 95% of those who died in the last six months were seniors aged 60 and above, and 72% of all deceased cases had not been fully vaccinated. Almost all of the remaining 28% who were fully vaccinated, suffered from underlying medical conditions such as high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer and heart, lung, or kidney diseases. Underlying conditions add risks, even if the conditions are well controlled before the patient encounters COVID-19, especially if the patient is elderly.

There is not yet conclusive information about the long-term health consequences of COVID-19. An NCID study found that one in 10 COVID-19 patients who recovered after the initial infection continued to display symptoms such as coughing or breathlessness six months after recovering from the acute illness. A study in the UK found that those who are vaccinated are half as likely to continue having symptoms about a month after COVID-19 infection as compared to those who are unvaccinated.

While most of our cases recover fully from COVID-19, we do see instances of re-infection. Up to mid-August, we had detected 32 re-infected cases and all of them were unvaccinated.

The risks of being unvaccinated are high. Compared to the vaccinated, someone who is 60 years old and above and unvaccinated, is six times more likely to need oxygen, eight times more likely to become critically ill and need the ICU and 17 times more likely to die.

So far, we have had one of the lowest fatality rates in the world. At the beginning, it was because we had such tight restrictions, rapid contact tracing and low total number of cases in the community. But with cases rising fast, the case fatality rate remains low now because we have reached such a high vaccination rate and because all those who have become sick have been able to receive the care that they need. Our healthcare system is stressed, but it has not been overwhelmed, unlike many countries last year, where patients had to be turned away and doctors had to choose amongst many patients whom to save.

These other countries experienced what is known as excess mortality, as the pandemic spread rapidly through the population and hospitals were overwhelmed. Excess mortality is when a lot more people die in a year than you expect.

We are trying very hard to avoid that, by keeping restrictions tight last year when our population was vulnerable to the disease and then cautiously opening up after we vaccinated the vast majority of our population. Even then, we have to accept there will be some deaths. Our goal is to make sure that there are no significant excess deaths, as a result of an inability to provide adequate medical care. And so far, that is something that we have been able to do and that we want to keep doing.

Up until recently we kept the absolute number of deaths small by ensuring that few people caught COVID-19 and also that those who were infected got good treatment and care. Now that we have to live with COVID-19, we will continue to protect people from getting infected through vaccination and safe management measures, but this protection is not complete. And that is why much larger numbers will get infected. But we will continue to make sure that those who are infected get good treatment and care, and so keep the death rate from COVID-19 as low as possible. Hence, we are doing everything we can to expand our ICU capacity and protect our healthcare system.

These efforts have succeeded. Our death rate is 0.2%, compared to 3% or more in countries that experienced a surge in cases before vaccination. This rate of 0.2% is comparable to catching pneumonia – pre-COVID-19. But it does mean that over time, the absolute number of deaths from COVID-19 will rise despite the best possible medical care. We could have, perhaps, 2,000 deaths per year from COVID-19. Most of these will be the elderly and those who are already unwell.

In comparison, every year, in peacetime, pre-COVID-19, about 4,000 patients pass on as a result of influenza, viral pneumonias and other respiratory diseases. These are also mostly the elderly and the unwell. That is why we keep emphasising the importance of vaccination and boosters. We must make sure that everyone who is infected with COVID-19 will receive proper medical care by our healthcare workers and hospital system and be given the best possible chance to fight the disease.

We have got to this point in our fight against COVID-19 without excess mortality. We have managed to continue to provide excellent healthcare for all COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients. I am extremely proud of my colleagues, co-workers and friends who man the wards, clinics, and many other sites where they perform their duties and we should place a high value on maintaining the standard.

What we are trying to do has not yet been done by any other country. We are trying to get to the point where the combination of high vaccination rates, booster jabs and even more boosting from mild infections means that COVID-19 will no longer spread as an epidemic in Singapore. And we are trying to get there without excess mortality. But no other country has done that before. In other words, though we will have fatalities as a result of COVID-19, we will not see more overall deaths than we would in a normal non-COVID-19 year. Nearly every other country that has arrived at that destination has paid a high price in lives.

I hope my explanation has helped Members understand why although we say we are living with COVID-19, we cannot just open up and risk having the number of cases shoot up, because more and more cases will translate into more and more ICU beds used. Beyond a certain point, that will force us to accept a lower standard of care, and hence, have more deaths that could have been prevented.

Despite our best efforts, events may overtake us and we may have no choice in the matter. If, despite our caution, ICU cases rise sharply, we will still do our very best to look after every patient. But at what level of care? I would strongly prefer if we can avoid that dreadful scenario. We need to continue to manage the overall number of cases in our population, even as we continue to increase our hospital capacity.

In all of this, there is hope. The main reason why we got to this point in the fight with COVID-19 with such low mortality rates is our people. I have spoken at length about the staff that I met at the ICUs and this applies to all our healthcare workers in the emergency departments, the clinics, the PHPCs, our swabbers, our contact tracers. Across every sector, everyone has given their all, together with an ongoing commitment to excellence in service.

MOH and the healthcare teams will continue to train staff, increase beds and expand ICU capacity. My MOH colleagues and I will keep working directly with the ICU directors and clinical leads to help them. They know better than me how to manage the patients, to provide clinical care, but they need support, resources and policies that allow them to optimise their outcomes. We will help to look after them and their staff.

All of us can continue to play our part. Vaccination remains critical, every single extra person who gets vaccinated makes a difference, to themselves and for all of us. Getting your booster shot as soon as you are eligible makes a difference. Following the safe management measures makes a difference. Regular testing makes a difference. Using the right healthcare resources appropriately makes a difference.

The current situation will not last forever. We will eventually come out of this. Eventually, enough of us will be vaccinated or will have been infected, that we will see the case numbers come down and the situation stabilise. But in getting there we should try to keep the number of deaths as low as possible.

That we got to this point, where after nearly two years of fighting a pandemic, I can explain our hope to maintain one of the lowest case fatality rates in the world, is a small miracle. It did not happen by chance. It happened because Singaporeans stood together, looked out for each other, did their duty and put the interests of others ahead of their own. And the healthcare workers of Singapore have done all this and much, much, more, caring for us all.

I received another message from a colleague: "we are one of the few countries in the world where ICU teams don't have to worry about resources and equipment – very grateful for that. Healthcare workers have given everything in the last two years, we have held ourselves up to the highest standards; we have the lowest mortality in the world; our people are still pushing on". Our people are still pushing on!

The healthcare workers we are worried about are also the same healthcare workers who are committed to doing what is needed to look after all their patients. They will do their duty, do their best and try their hardest. Words will never be enough, but I express our gratitude on behalf of this House. [Applause.]

Mr Yip Hon Weng.

I thank the Senior Minister of State for the clarity about the COVID-19 situation in Singapore in the Ministerial Statement.

Given that seniors, especially those who are not vaccinated, are most susceptible to severe illnesses due to COVID-19, can there be initiatives to identify, isolate and protect these seniors? And thus, if we can implement such measures to protect seniors in an effective way, is the Ministry prepared to consider loosening safe management measures for the rest of the population?

Sir, I thank the Member for the question. In a way, that is what we are trying to do with our vaccination-differentiated measures: expose some people to a lower level of risk while allowing other parts of our population to do the things that make life a bit more bearable.

But there is only so far that we can go. If you are a senior and you are unwell and, for some reason, unvaccinated, you cannot be isolated completely. You need fresh air, food, contact with other people.

So, I understand what the Member is asking. The question is, how far can we go and we do not think we can go much further than where we are today, with vaccination-differentiated measures.

But there is another dimension to this question. Because it supposes that the seniors and the vulnerable are a different segment of the population from the rest of us, who are younger, healthier and vaccinated. The truth is, we interact and we meet and we pass infections on to them.

I think the experience of the last two years, in a way, has demonstrated just how much intermingling and interconnectedness there is between all kinds of networks and communities here in Singapore. It is part of our human response. Our grandparents want to see their grandkids. We want to go and look after our parents. Each of those interactions poses a very small but measurable risk to them as well.

So, I think we have to assume that whatever it is that we are doing, we must treat the whole population as one. We will try with the vaccination-differentiated measures but there is only so far that we can go.

Dr Lim Wee Kiak.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I would like to raise two supplementary questions. Let me thank the Senior Minister of State for the Statement just now.

The first supplementary question is about whether we can make vaccination mandatory since the vaccine now has been fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). I filed a Parliamentary Question asking when will HSA make the vaccine not used under emergency use, which means it can be fully licensed to use for normal times. That is the first supplementary question.

The second supplementary question is regarding the Senior Minister of State's observation about the immense stress and pressure on our healthcare workers and what they are shouldering, especially over the last past few months. I would like to ask whether MOH will be planning for more support and recognition awards to healthcare workers, given the amount of stress and the work they have shouldered through the pandemic.

Sir, making COVID-19 vaccination compulsory is a significant move. It should be carefully considered. We would have to consider a number of factors: vaccination coverage, international practice and the availability or performance of fully registered COVID-19 vaccines.

The introduction of the vaccination-differentiated measures, in a way, is to try and get around some of that problem, to expose the different segments of the population to different risks. But in terms of making vaccination compulsory, it is also quite difficult in terms of the execution.

You can imagine that for something like childhood vaccines, you may say that without it, you cannot have access to play groups or school. There is a specific thing that you want to do and for that, you are getting the vaccine. But here, we are talking about all the normal activities of life and so policing it, executing it, implementing it is not without challenges. And the question is, how much benefit will there be?

So, I think it is something to consider but there are a whole lot of complications associated with that. Sir, the Minister for Health has indicated that he will answer the second question.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I thank Dr Lim Wee Kiak for asking the question on recognition for healthcare workers.

Many people contributed to this fight against COVID-19. We have the people who do all the swabs, supervise our self-swabs, the people who run our vaccination centres, people who make sure the vaccines arrive on Singapore shores, the people who do conveyancing every day – hundreds, thousands of trips to and fro, hospitals to treatment facilities – all our officers on the ground, safe distancing ambassadors, our vendors who disinfect places that we have been to, teachers who kept schools going for past 20 months, preschool teachers included, social workers, our community volunteers who help out those who are in need. We all owe a debt of gratitude to all of them for collectively putting up this fight.

But as Senior Minister of State Janil Puthucheary has very vividly and, in a very heartfelt way, described, I think the role of healthcare workers is especially important. They are not like the other frontliners, they are also our last line of defence.

So, while the rest of Singapore try to get back to a normal life, we try to get back to work, to travel for work or study, they bear that disproportionate responsibility. If something goes wrong, they are the ones who carry the burden and are literally the last line of defence, while the rest of us can continue our work and life.

So, I know that monetary award is not everything but I think it is probably appropriate and the least we can do to recognise their commitment, their dedication and all the physical, mental, emotional stress that they are going through. So, thank you for that suggestion. It is something that we are seriously looking into.

Leader of the Opposition.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, and thank you to the Senior Minister of State for the Statement on ICU capacity.

I would like to refer to a report which is found on the SingHealth website. It is carrying a Straits Times article on ICU capacity. This is dated 13 August and I think this number has been quoted by individuals online as well as when the Minister for Health said that up to 1,000 ICU beds can be made available for critically ill COVID-19 patients, if needed.

I think what the numbers suggest, and what the numbers we have now insofar as ICU capacity is concerned, is that there is yet sufficient potential for upscaling the number of ICU beds. Of course, the assumption being that this remark that was made on 13 August refers both to the bed itself, the ancillary equipment needed and the manpower needed to manage 1,000 beds.

Sir, I would just like to ask a question pertaining to this number of 1,000. Is this still the operating parameter or have things changed quite significantly?

The second point is somewhat connected but it is with regard to the measures introduced vis-a-vis the Stabilisation Phase.

I think there has been some pushback in terms of retaining the number of two individuals in a dining capacity. There is significant public feedback that this should be increased to five, especially for vaccinated individuals, particularly since the Government is also opening up more Vaccinated Travel Lanes (VTLs) and lifting travel bans. At least, for the South Asian group of countries, this was lifted very recently.

So, there is a view that cannot quite connect why dining capacity cannot be opened up in view of the number of vaccinated individuals who actually are not imposing on the ICU capacity as much as non-vaccinated individuals. So, I hope there could be some clarity provided insofar as what is holding the Government back on this number, on opening up at least for dining for up to five individuals.

My third question really – and this is the last one, Mr Speaker – follows up on the numbers the Senior Minister of State shared with regard to the resignations in the healthcare system. One thousand five hundred for the first half of 2021 and I believe an additional 500 were foreign healthcare professionals.

Can I just confirm what have been the recruitment numbers over the same period? The Senior Minister of State said in his Statement that the recruitment of healthcare workers from overseas is continuing. So, it will be helpful to have the numbers that are coming on board as well and not just the numbers that are leaving.

I will take the first two questions and maybe Senior Minister of State Janil Puthucheary can also comment on the first question and answer the third.

I remember quite vividly that we talked about the possibility of ramping up to 1,000 beds. I spoke about it at a press conference illustrating how if cases doubled every week, in five weeks, the beds will actually be exhausted. It is the illustration that even with that kind of capacity, if infections run away from us, it will be of no use. We would just get overwhelmed in a matter of weeks.

I also remember vividly – do not even get near that – not even near the 1,000 limit.

Senior Minister of State Janil Puthucheary is a lot more experienced in this and he knows it inside out. I think he had explained that we have all the logistics and all the consumables to set it up but I think manpower will be a serious constraint. Can they handle 1,000 ICUs? I think not without a major degradation of care.

So, I think it is not a black-and-white kind of situation. With every step up in the number of beds, there is degradation of care and there is a trade-off.

The second question on whether we can increase dining to five for vaccinated diners. We wish to get there too. We were there before. We were even at eight at one point. It is important to the F&B industry, it is important to Singaporeans, it is important for families to get together.

But I think the time is not here yet. I think we will get there. Because when you meet with five, as explained by Senior Minister of State Janil Puthucheary, you do increase the risk of transmission. If it is transmission within vaccinated individuals, it may not be that serious. But we also live with older people, with seniors who may be unvaccinated. And we can inadvertently bring the virus to them.

I have a neighbour, an unvaccinated senior and she has streams of visitors coming to visit her, persuading her to get vaccinated. So, I was persuading their visitors maybe stop coming to persuade her, just give her a call. But this is life in Singapore. So, we do have to pay attention to that.

There is always a comparison with why is it that we can open for travel but not for dine-in. The difference is this, that in the initial stage, Singapore has very low infections and the world around us has very high infection rates. So, when you open up borders at that time, you are opening up the floodgates. Today, the situation is entirely different. Our infection rates and the rates outside are similar. In fact, they may have lower infections than us because they went through huge waves and we are still going through ours. Furthermore, we limit travel or SHN-free travel to only vaccinated individuals and at the border, you are subject to tests.

So, theoretically, if you can have an event, like a wedding, a bigger wedding, everybody is subject to a test, you can sit in fives. So, it is actually a similar concept. This also present possibilities for the MTF to think about in future, whether through testing, through vaccination, we can allow gathering that is a bit less restrictive. These are all possibilities that we will continue to think about.

Sir, I do not have the specific numbers of recruitment figures for the different clusters and organisations. We can get them.

But I think one of the challenges we have to appreciate is that even if we recruit from overseas, anybody coming into that environment is new, they are inexperienced. By definition, they are inexperienced with the environment, our healthcare protocols, but they may actually be literally new in terms of their training as well. So, their role is going to be quite different. It is going to be augmenting manpower where, perhaps, that level of acuity and that level of complexity does not exist.

So, while we are recruiting – and we have been actively and I will get the numbers – operationally, I cannot see that that is going to make a huge difference in the ICUs. It will make a difference in other parts of our ecosystem. We hope that can displace a little bit of the manpower into some of the higher acuity areas and then release a few people to go and help in the ICU. But I think this is a bit more of a medium-term strategy rather than something that we can rely on as an urgent fix to our current problem.

If I may make a comment on the first part that Minister for Health talked about, some of the uncertainties are about how long we have to carry a certain load or a certain number of patients within the ICU. If you have a terrible disaster, mass casualty, a very bad accident, you may have many times the number of patients that we currently have in the ICU. But as a one-off incident, the patients will not stay as long.

What we have today is the equivalent of a low-intensity conflict and having to be on readiness and high alert for weeks and weeks, and months and months. Your surge capacity at the start of a low-intensity conflict is very, very different after two years or after one month. Even this current surge when it started, there was really no way to know or model how long it was going to last and what the peak of peaks would be.

So, what the Minister talked about is the logistical planning parameter. If you do not have 1,000 bed spaces, you know that you cannot get there. But if you do, that is physically where you can locate people. If you need the equipment and, thankfully, as a system over the last two years – but it started long before the last two years, through emergency planning and resilience preparedness – we actually have the stocks of equipment that we need: the consumables, the little parts to drive the machines as well as the drugs, in order to cater for many, many more patients than we have today. So, as the colleague of mine said, we are not resource-constrained at the moment.

The manpower issue is not something that we can do a simple calculation for. As I said, it depends on how long this goes on for, how long the peak goes on for. Crucially, today, coming to the end of 2021, the amount that we can reduce business-as-usual is really quite different from where we were, let us say, six months ago; in fact, where we were, even three months ago. That is an additional factor that we have to take into account. So, the number is something that we have to think about in a fairly dynamic way.

Mr Lim Biow Chuan.

Sir, I just want to thank the Senior Minister of State for his reply. Sir, I am just concerned that over the past week, the number of deaths had been in the double digits. We had 13 yesterday, 14 the day before; 16, 15, 10, as compared to the end of September, where the deaths were two, three, four.

Can the Senior Minister of State explain why has the number of deaths increased by such a large number? Is it due to the relaxation of rules? Is there anything else we can do to cut down on the number of deaths because every life lost is a tragedy.

Sir, I thank the Member for his questions. Why are deaths rising? The proportion of deaths has not changed. Of people who get COVID-19, the risk of dying, the proportion of them who go on to need the ICU and then, subsequently succumbed actually has not changed.

There are two major reasons why we are starting to see the absolute total numbers rise now. The first is that the base number of our population that is being infected with COVID-19 has risen very, very significantly compared to the time period that he was talking about.

The second is that although some patients with COVID-19 who pass on, will pass on very soon after getting the infection, most will take a long time to get seriously ill and may take some time before they succumb, which is a testament to the care that we have put in place and their attempts to fight the infection.

So, there is a lag. The deaths that we are seeing now are not necessarily the same people who are being infected this week. There are people who are infected, perhaps, two weeks ago, maybe even a month ago. After you get the infection, it takes time before you develop the need to go on oxygen support. And then, once you are on oxygen, not everybody will go on to the ICU or succumb, but it takes time for conditions to worsen to the point where then you need further care.

So, there are two main reasons why the deaths are rising in total number: baseline has increased and it is that effect of the lag. But I stress, the proportion of patients who then succumb has not changed.

How to prevent the deaths? Well, vaccinations, as I have explained; booster jabs, as I have explained. But even if you have had those, you may have other underlying illnesses and the underlying illnesses need to be well-controlled. So, if you have diabetes, control your diabetes well. If you are requiring medication, take your medication regularly, comply with all the usual prescriptions around maintaining good health.

For those of us that are fortunate not to have health problems, all the usual rules apply: eat better, sleep better, get more exercise and reach out to your loved ones. And if you are a smoker, stop smoking. If you get a lung infection with COVID-19 and you have knocked out some of your lung function through smoking, you are not off to a good start. These are the ways in which we can prevent mortality and morbidity in COVID-19.

Assoc Prof Jamus Lim.

Thank you, Speaker, and I thank the Senior Minister of State Janil for a comprehensive explanation. Like him, I am very much grateful for the efforts that our healthcare workers and frontline workers have put in.

I have two questions to follow up on pre-empting infrastructure. One has to do with ICU beds. I would note that just before this discussion about increasing COVID-19 coverage to 1,000 ICU beds, our ICU beds per 100,000 population was about six. This is half that of the OECD average. And only Japan, among those that have lower ICU beds per 100,000 of the population has a significantly larger elderly share of the population. So, the question here is: if we know, as we did in the earlier half of this year, that we were going into an endemic surge, why is it that during this lull period, there was not a more concerted effort in increasing our capacity and this, of course, includes bringing in relevant manpower, as Senior Minister of State Janil mentioned was the big challenge?

My second question builds on this issue of manpower. Given the global nurse shortage, WHO actually estimates that by 2030, there will be nine million needed worldwide and 370,000 just for the US. My question is whether looking forward, Singapore would be competitive in attracting these foreign nurses, and if not, what steps are being made to expand our local nursing and doctor workforce to ensure that we are able to meet our future needs?

Sir, I thank Assoc Prof Lim for the question. Sir, as I have explained, pre-COVID-19, peacetime, we had about 300 ICU beds for the country; 298 to be precise. And the average occupancy was about 63%. So, it is not that we did not have spare capacity pre-COVID-19. But as I have already also explained, if you wanted to open up more of this capacity and keep it empty, it would have an impact on resources that could have been applied elsewhere.

So, I do not know if that addresses his first question about why we did not do more before we knew about COVID-19. I think comparing with other countries is fraught in this situation because the number does not reflect, for example, clinical practices, the demographics in terms of the health patterns that they have. So, I do not think one can take the view that there is a certain number of ICU beds that you must have per population. I think what we are most interested in is what the ICU system and the healthcare system is able to deliver in terms of clinical outcomes. I think if the Member dove into those details, he would find that our clinical outcomes and our ICU outcomes are much more than comparable to any of those countries that he has listed, with perhaps less total beds per population.

Some of these also rest on what counts as an ICU admission. It is quite different from country to country because of the way in which the nurses are licensed, the way in which drugs are licensed, the way in which doctors practise.

He then asked about a more concerted effort to increase capacity. Well, it is not that we stood still and waited to see what happened. We were indeed doing the cross-training. As I had explained, the cross-training and the cross deployment of nurses, that was a concerted effort. The reduction in elective work to free up resources, that was a concerted effort during the lull.

But the thing about ICU manpower, you cannot stand it up and have it lying around waiting. If a year ago, we said we needed to increase our manpower by three times or by four times, what would those nurses have been doing in the ensuing 12 months or six months? They certainly would not have been getting experience at ICU care because you need to look after ICU patients in order to become an ICU-trained staff.

So, you can see that what we have been doing is opening up capacity ahead of the curve, but not so far ahead of the curve that we are having people sit around idle, while other services are undermanned or unmanned. But ahead of the curve, so that we can do some of that training and redeployment training and redeployment.

Intensive care, critical care, whether you talk about the doctors, the nurses, the respiratory therapists, the social workers, the pharmacists that are deployed in there, it is a clinical practice. It is not something that you can learn and be ready for by reading textbooks and doing online courses. You have to be mentored and precepted into looking after patients with your hands, eyes and senses. So, it is not something that you could have gone five X, four X, in vacuo in peacetime and held everything ready in abeyance. It would have been a waste of resources but it also would not have been effective in terms of changing the outcomes currently.

I stress again that while the healthcare system is under stress and our healthcare workers are tired, they are delivering excellent outcomes. And I say this not as matter of hyperbole but that lowest mortality rate in the world is matched by any number of other patient care and clinical quality indicators which I think we and our healthcare workers should be justifiably proud of.

Ms Mariam Jaafar.

I thank the Senior Minister of State for his explanations. I have a supplementary question related to ICU bed capacity. Sir, the Senior Minister of State gave the data on ICU bed capacity and utilisation for both COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 beds and clarifying the limiting factor, that is, manpower.

I have a question because based on the data provided, we have currently, I think, 382 total ICU beds and he also said that 163 non-COVID-19 ICU beds are running at 80% utilisation today, an increase from 63% pre-COVID-19. So, I think, my supplementary question really is, despite this increase, how do I benchmark 80%? Is it something that we are still being too conservative about and part of the increase to 350 ICU beds will still be able to come from this pool? Or is it really something we should be really quite concerned about, because if my Math serves me right, 63% occupancy of 298 beds in 2019 means a 188 non-COVID-19 ICU beds being occupied versus 130 today that you are saying 80% of 163? Are we just putting less people in ICU today? And is there really no impact or no deterioration on patient outcomes?

Sir, I thank the Member for her question. Maybe I can start with the last part first, which is, is there no impact and no deterioration? Actually, I would say, firstly there is an impact. And I think the statements and quotes from my professional colleagues, what I have described as the conditions under which they are working and their concerns for themselves, that is the impact.

But there has not been a deterioration, that is the outcomes.

So, it is through their heroic efforts, their resolve, their resilience and, frankly, the excellence of the people that we have in our healthcare system, that in these conditions, as a result of this impact on our manpower deployment, they have been able to deliver excellent clinical outcomes. I think the uncertainty is how long do we expect them to do this for? Do they know and do we know? And there is some uncertainty with this.

I think in this issue of being too conservative or do we have the right number of beds, maybe I can try to phrase it the other way around.

First, let me assume that she agrees with me that actually we cannot over-divert resources from non-COVID-19 patients to stand by for COVID-19 patients that have not arrived yet. People will have heart attacks, people will have accidents and they will need care; and if you have nurses, doctors, beds ready only to accept COVID-19 patients and not to accept all these other conditions, we will see an increased death rate, we will see excess mortality not from COVID-19, but from all these other conditions.

So, we must increase slowly step by step trying to be just ahead of the curve. Ultimately, as I say, we may end up having to accept a lower standard of care, but we will want the lower standard of care, as it were, to be evenly spread across so that no part of the system breaks, that everybody is under some degree of strain and going through this together.

But in terms of maybe understanding where we are, the 63% of certain number of beds, 280 beds, it is a bit hard to grasp in terms of the proportions because we keep changing the denominator. We keep increasing the number of ICU beds. So, when you had 100 ICU beds, you may have 60% occupancy; now, we have got 280 ICU beds, you are still at 60% occupancy.

So, it sounds as if it is not too much of an issue, but if we try to think of it in terms of workload; so, currently, we have about 160 ICU beds set aside for non-COVID-19 patients. Not all of them are occupied. We will come to that in a minute. But they are there. There is an administrative and logistical load keeping those beds on standby.

We also have, by the end of this week, 280 beds set aside for COVID-19 patients in the ICU. That is a total of about 440. So, 440 beds, currently set aside in ICU. What does that compare to in 2019? It is exactly 298, but let us say 300; so, essentially, the hospital system is carrying a logistical and administrative load of about 140%, 145% compared to peacetime, just on standby.

But if you look at the actual number of patients that we have in the ICU, the actual number of patients that our care teams are working on, it is about between 130 and 140 non-COVID-19 ICU patients, what we would call the business-as-usual patients; and today, it is about 130, a few days ago is 139 for COVID-19. So, let us say about 135 each, about half-half, that is 270 ICU patients across the hospital ecosystem that our teams have to manage. Pre-COVID-19, 2019, we had about on average in the hospital system 180 ICU patients across the across the landscape.

So, that is a workload increase to 150%. You can sustain that for a short period of time. Can you sustain that for a prolonged period of time?

So, I hope that answers the Member's questions in terms of are we being conservative or are we planning ahead. What we are hoping to do is chart a middle path, ramp up capacity just ahead of demand, with enough time to give the staff some degree of orientation, training and be ready for when the surge comes in, but not so much that we end up sacrificing the rest of our healthcare system. That would be the inappropriate thing to do. We are trying to tread a middle ground.

Mr Gerald Giam.

Thank you, Sir. I join the Minister and Senior Minister of State in expressing my deepest gratitude to our healthcare workers for fighting this battle on the frontlines and holding the fort in very trying conditions.

I have two clarifications.

First, based on the situation that Senior Minister of State outlined, it appears the number of healthcare workers is the limiting factor for further reopening. Since healthcare human resource capacity cannot be easily ramped up and our vaccination coverage is almost maximised, what prospect then is there for a further reopening anytime soon?

Secondly, while the Sinovac vaccine has been added to the national vaccination programme, I understand it is still not available to those who can take mRNA vaccines. Others can register their interest but are not guaranteed the booking. So, in the interest of maximising vaccine coverage and minimising hospitalisations, can MOH make Sinovac generally available to all those who have not been vaccinated but simply prefer to get that vaccine, whatever the merits of that preference are?

Sir, I thank the Member for his questions. I think he has misunderstood. The availability of healthcare workers is not what will decide whether we reopen or do not reopen. It is how many with severe illnesses and how many deaths we are prepared to tolerate in that controlled process of getting to the point whereas a combination of vaccination, boosters and mild or asymptomatic infections, our overall population is much, much more resistant to COVID-19. Getting there is not a function of how many healthcare workers we have. How many deaths we have on the road to that destination is a function of how many healthcare workers we have and how many cases we can manage at a time.

So, as I have said and as many other people have said, this will pass, this will get better. We do not know exactly when but we are building up our entire society's immunity and resilience against COVID-19. And as we do so, every day that passes, every extra time that we can hold the situation, we are more likely to be able to open up safely. When we do lighten restrictions, you can expect there will be more cases and there will be more waves.

But if our immunity and our resilience is built up, each wave will be less threatening, there will be less cases than the last. And hence, our restrictions do not have to be anywhere near as tight. So, I do not know that I have answered his question directly, but I disagree with the way he has framed it. And I hope he understands the explanation that I have given.

For Sinovac, I think we have to remember that the proportion of people who prefer Sinovac and who need Sinovac is very, very small. It is 1% or 2% of our total base. But also that its effectiveness with the Delta variant has not been demonstrated to the same degree as all the other vaccines. And what we are concerned about is what happens if you get the infection despite having had the vaccination.

With our national vaccination programme, if you get the infection even though you have had the vaccination, having had the vaccination converts it to a mild illness, a mild illness you may not even be aware of, an asymptomatic infection and, potentially, rest at home as a result. We do not have such data for Sinovac and so, given that is the case, we feel it is our clinical responsibility to recommend that if it is possible, our population take the mRNA vaccine. Sinovac is available as an option when that is not possible. And so, it is better than nothing, but it is not what we would see as the most appropriate, given that it is the Delta variant that is spreading through our population and given that we are trying to avoid serious illnesses and convert this infection into a mild infection.

Mr Ang Wei Neng.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I also want to join the rest of the Members here to salute the efforts put in by the healthcare workers for doing such a wonderful job so far.

Meanwhile, I would like to raise the issue of ICU beds from the other perspective. We note that one of the most important indicators as the Senior Minister of State and Minister have said that MOH is watching, is the utilisation rate of the ICU beds. So, I would like to clarify the following: if the utilisation of the ICU beds is acceptable, that is, not overly stretched and even the daily cases are about two, three thousand a day, does it mean that we are prepared to live with this high number for the next one, two months? If so, are we prepared to remove some of the restrictions or lessen some the restrictions of COVID-19?

Sir, I thank the Member for his question. Mr Ang Wei Neng is correct that the high total number, because 99% are asymptomatic, does not in itself mean whether we can lift or not lift restrictions. What we have to look at is the number of cases that require assistance and help from our healthcare system and make sure that we are able to provide for that.

But it is not the case that only looking at the ICU utilisation rate will we then make the decision. The reason is we have a much larger group of people who require oxygen. Not all of them require ICU care but you cannot entirely predict which of them will end up requiring ICU care. So, if we have a very large base of people requiring oxygen, you have to be ready that some of them will deteriorate and so there is a forward projection for ICU care that we have to take into account in terms of our decisions to open up or loosen or lighten. Because as the total number of patients increases, the total number of patients requiring oxygen will also increase in proportion.

So, he is right but there is a little bit more nuance to the consideration. And so, this is why in the previous MTF press conference, they talked about the doubling rate or the expansion rate of the ICU care. It is not the number. It is whether we think it is going up and how fast we think it is going up or coming back down here. So, these are some of the factors we have to take into account, Sir.

Mr Leong Mun Wai.

Thank you, Speaker. I would like to ask the Senior Minister of State what exactly caused the infections in our country to suddenly surge to the thousand cases level, around about the end of September? What are the various routes of infection, especially for the seniors? Because that is the base where the subsequent fatality comes about, which the Senior Minister of State has shared just now.

For example, there are some rumours, unconfirmed information in the public arena, that a lot of these seniors, those who are living alone, come from the nursing homes and those who are infected in their own homes, together with their children — how many of them are actually having another COVID-19 patient inside the home, under the Home Recovery Programme? So, these various routes of infection would be something that, I think, we hope to get more information from the Senior Minister of State.

Second is that, while we are saying that the fatality had gone up, are there changes in our treatment protocols for the seniors in the hospital? And then, is there a possibility that we have some preventive treatments for seniors and also for other citizens or other residents in our country, to lower the risk of COVID-19? So, in other words, are there potential treatments that we can introduce? So far, there has not been a lot of information on that from the Government.

And thirdly, of course, the most sensitive topic right now in our society is that: is there a justification to impose vaccination differentiation on the whole group of unvaccinated people? Because the unvaccinated group consists of: one, the 70,000 seniors who are still unvaccinated and probably, like just now, one of the Members had raised the issue, maybe we should isolate them a bit more, or rather pay attention specially to them so that we cut down on their infection rate. But these 70,000 had come down from 200,000 in August. So, maybe there is very little leeway that we can actually convince them to get vaccinated. So, we have to isolate them and special care has to be given to them and more volunteers may be assigned to look after them and all that.

But there is also another group of unvaccinated people in our country, 240,000 of them, between 13 years old and 59 years old, relatively healthy, but they chosed not to be vaccinated for various reasons. They are healthy and so, is it appropriate to also impose the vaccination differentiation policy on them, especially the latest MOM advisory which actually may affect their livelihood? Is it fair to impose something that destroys a livelihood of a person who chooses not to be vaccinated? Thank you. Sorry for the long explanation.

I thank Mr Leong for his questions. I would point out that his questions have some contradictions. He asked if there was a change or some treatment which could prevent COVID-19 for seniors who either get sick or get unwell. I presume that by asking that question, he then requires us to use a preventive treatment. If I propose to him that there is a preventive treatment which is 10 times effective, it would reduce your risk by 10 times, he may even then ask me to mandate it and require it. We have one; it is called vaccination. If you are above the age of 60, you are 17 times more likely to pass, if you are unvaccinated than if you are vaccinated. So, a vaccination answers Mr Leong's second question.

Hence, when he then asks, "How do we justify our vaccine-differentiated measures and how do we justify imposing something on people who chose not to get vaccinated?" Our justification is that we are trying to save their lives, we are trying for their loved ones and their family not to lose a family member. We are trying to prevent them from becoming sick and overwhelming our healthcare system so that them and the rest of us, then do not lose the ability to have good care for heart disease, diabetes and cancer, and all the other things we need healthcare for.

So, his second and third questions seem to me to contradict each other and I think he needs to decide does he believe that we should be fairly liberal about this and choose to allow people to take on for themselves a really unacceptable degree of risk and impose the consequences of that risk on all of us? Or does he want us to go and tell people exactly what to do and constrain their lives in a way that protects all of us? He seems to, in his two questions, choose extremes at one end of the other. We are trying to tread a middle path and trying to get the best of both.

He asks then what caused the infections in our country and what are the routes of infection for seniors who are living alone, in their own homes. The route of infection is largely from human-to-human contact. That is how people get this infection. If you were truly isolated and you were entirely living alone, with no human contact, you could maybe get away without this. But I think, people find that sort of life is also fairly unbearable. So, whether you are living alone as a senior or in a nursing home or in your own home, usually there is some form of human contact. And that is precisely why we cannot think of our population as the seniors and the rest of us, the unvaccinated and the rest of us. We intermingle and we meet each other and we pass on the infection to each other.

Our vaccine-differentiated measures are trying to make the risk lower for one than the other, but it is not about separating us out into completely separate populations and that would not be possible.

Dr Shahira Abdullah.

I thank the Senior Minister of State for his clarification on the situation. I know that you have said that patients with underlying conditions, even if well-controlled, will still be at a higher risk of death; and that not being vaccinated will put Singaporeans at an even higher risk.

Could I ask if currently MOH has any data on the percentage of vaccinated patients who have died from COVID-19 who have underlying conditions that are actually well-controlled; and if not, would MOH consider tracking this?

Sir, I thank the Member for her question. It is not straightforward to answer. Because the definition of well-controlled will vary and the way in which you see the impact of good control of the disease when you get COVID-19 will also be quite different. Let me give some examples.

Let us just use diabetes for example. If you have had diabetes for many years, diagnosed young, struggling with it, living with it, but you have had it kind of controlled. Do you have a lower risk than someone who perhaps had it diagnosed only one or two years ago, but really has not had it well-controlled yet? I am not entirely sure what the answer to that question is. And when you then encounter COVID-19, even if you had it well-controlled, because your body is fighting another illness, now COVID-19, your diabetes control goes out. So, do you then look at well-controlled at the point that you got infected, or the point that you got into ICU?

The data that we have does not help to inform us to the point where we can make a recommendation and we can say, "Well, if you have diabetes and your blood sugar is like this, you are okay; if your blood sugar is like that, it is not okay". We are still at the point where we say, "If you have diabetes, control it as best you can. Whether you have COVID-19 or not, that is a risk. Now that COVID-19 is present, you need to really make sure you take care of yourself." And this then applies to a wide variety of conditions.

So, it is quite clear that poorly controlled diseases do increase the risk very significantly. But there are some patients even with well-controlled diseases, it appears that having that disease means that they handle COVID-19 poorly even if the disease was well-controlled when they get COVID-19. I hope that adds some clarity to the Member's question.

Mr Melvin Yong.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I thank the Senior Minister of State for his comprehensive Statement. I would like to shift the focus to the welfare of our healthcare professionals. According to the Director of Medical Services, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused a significant backlog of follow-up visits and elective operations, and it will take the hospitals many months to catch up and clear this backlog. The Senior Minister of State also earlier mentioned that 90% of our healthcare workers were not able to clear their annual leave.

I would like to ask which hospitals have the greatest backlog and how will this affect the amount of leave that its staff will be allowed to take, given the immense pressure faced to clear the backlog. As there are clear challenges mentioned by the Senior Minister of State to quickly increase staffing to alleviate the manpower situation, what are the hospitals planning to do to allow our healthcare professionals to at least take a break during this period?

Sir, I do not have the data in terms of specific hospitals or clinical sites which have backlogs and which do not. Part of that is because we do operate as one system and where there is a little bit of capacity here or there, there is some load balancing and different sites work together. So, that is going to be dynamic, they are working to try to clear this as best they can.

We are also uncertain how long this will go on for, so it is a bit hard to predict where we will be in terms of this – the rest of the healthcare system's duties and responsibilities once COVID-19 starts to wane – because we do not quite know when that will happen. So, there is a stress on the healthcare system, it will persist for some time after COVID-19 starts to come down, precisely for the reasons the Member has identified.

Will this affect leave? Possibly. But the hospitals and the staff, the leadership are going to try to find ways to give their teams some rest and I do not think this is something that we can settle on a policy basis, it is very granular, it depends on the size of your team and the various other duties, when is your lull time, when is your up time. And I suspect what will happen is that the different teams, the different departments, the different divisions will allow rotating leave in different patterns to suit their acuity levels. And probably, you may have some people who are on leave but have a relatively short notice to be present, or they may be on local leave and another proportion which are allowed overseas leave and so forth.

I think these are operational parameters and you have to let the clinical teams make these decisions on their own. We need to try to support them at a more systemic level.

Minister Ong Ye Kung.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I want to make a comment but also to go back to two questions that were raised earlier. One is by the Member, Mr Gerald Giam, who asked about Sinovac. As the Senior Minister of State mentioned, it is now available as an option under our National Vaccination Programme. So, it is generally available in some clinics and also at the Raffles City Vaccination Centre just nearby. So, if you are 60 and above, cannot take or just do not want to take mRNA, you can walk in to take your Sinovac. Yesterday, I think a few hundreds did so, covered by Zaobao. If you are below 60, you have to make an appointment, but it is generally available.

The second point I want to mention is what Mr Leong Mun Wai raised, where he talked about some rumours. I am not sure you can repeat rumours in this House; I will leave it to the Leader. But he mentioned something about "nursing home", something about "home transmission".

Nursing home infections are a small percentage of the total senior infection. The last I calculated, it is not the most updated but it is about 6.4%. So, it is a small percentage. The large majority is actually transmission within the community. [Please refer to "Clarification by Minister for Health", Official Report, 1 November 2021, Vol 95, Issue No 41, Correction by Written Statement section.]

He asked about transmission in households. We have been tracking this. Within a household, if somebody is positive, approximately 10% of household members will subsequently get infected. So, about one in 10. But out of that 10%, 8% get it very early on. That means at the point of entry into quarantine or into Health Risk Warning (HRW), you are tested and you are positive; suggesting that actually, they got it at the same time as the index case. Then, during the subsequent days, another 2% then got transmitted.

Therefore, I think from the evidence that we have been tracking so far, the incidence of transmitting at home, so long as you take the precautions, is actually not high. The high transmissions still happen within the community, through person-to-person interaction.

I want to just maybe make some general comments after hearing all the questions.

Dealing with COVID-19 is quite different from business or organisation planning, where you know that this season or this month, if it is coming to Christmas, business is going to go up, so, let us plan for it, make sure we have manpower and capacity.

But we are looking at a crisis of a generation, a global pandemic crisis, not something that we plan year-to-year based on seasons or a five-year plan. It hits you and it overwhelms the healthcare system all over the world.

You look at the papers today on the G20 meeting and in France and Italy, life seems to be normal, but we forget what they went through last year. Go back, dig up the papers last year on how the whole healthcare system was overwhelmed.

Regardless of what you say about their ICU provisions and all that, or their healthcare workers' provisions, when COVID-19 hit those societies, they were totally overwhelmed. Doctors had to choose who got the hospital bed, who did not, who they had to save and who does not get saved. Those were the painful human tragedies that happened and the big human price that they paid to get to where they are today. Do not forget that.

Mr Lim Biow Chuan asked, how do we prevent and minimise death? We prevent and minimise death by making sure we do not go through that, of what other countries have gone through. You name it. Whether it is the US, the UK, France, Germany, Italy. They all went through that. Near home – Indonesia, Malaysia. They all went through that.

We avoid excess death by avoiding that, by preventing that totally. How do we do that? By not being dogmatic.

There are two camps in the world. One says zero-COVID-19 strategy is the right way to go. One says, no, you have to have living-with-COVID-19 strategies and maybe even Freedom Day. We say, we do both.

Last year, before we had vaccinations, when we were vulnerable to the disease, we took a zero-COVID-19 strategy. Everything was tight. Borders were closed as a result. Quarantined everybody. We kept incidences very low. We kept deaths very low. That was last year.

Then, we went on to a national vaccination programme, got ourselves to about 70% to 75% by National Day. Then, we said, zero-COVID-19 is over, we need to start opening up. But yet, we do not take another dogmatic approach to say we must go for Freedom Day and open up all at once. But we take the middle path: not total lockdown, neither is it Freedom Day, but we open up gradually.

And what is the limiting factor? It is our healthcare system. Making sure that it can cope, given the infection rate and how that translates into ICU cases and to people who fall severely ill.

That is how we have been proceeding. As Senior Minister of State Janil Puthucheary said, with each passing day, with more vaccinations and some people recovered well and built up natural immunity, we accumulated antibodies and resilience within our society.

I know Members of this House, including myself, all wish that life goes back to normal, that we can have dining in five or more, we can have our proper wedding dinners and events, go back to our grassroots functions and community functions. We all wish we can all do that. We do not have to sit up there in the Gallery anymore. Everybody can sit in the Chamber, engaging each other.

We all wish to do that and I think we will get there. We get there by continuing this path, building up our antibodies day by day. I do not know how long it would take. The Prime Minister said maybe three months, maybe six. We wish it is shorter rather than longer. But many countries have gone through the process and reached there, and we shall reach there too.

End of Ministerial Statement. We have a Personal Explanation from Ms Raeesah Khan.

On 3 August, I spoke in this House on the Motion on Empowering Women. During my speech, I had shared an anecdote of a survivor of sexual assault. I was not present with the survivor in the Police station as I described. The anecdote was shared by the survivor in a support group for women, which I was a part of.

I did not share that I was a part of the group as I did not have the courage to publicly admit that I was part of it.

I attended the support group because I, myself, am a survivor of sexual assault. I was sexually assaulted when I was 18 studying abroad. That assault has traumatised me till this day. The fear and shame accompanying sexual assault is extreme and long lasting, as it has been and still is for me.

Unlike the survivor whose anecdote I shared in this House, I did not have the courage to report my own assault. Yet, as a survivor, I wanted so deeply to speak up and also share the account I had heard when speaking on the Motion without revealing my own private experience.

I should not have shared the survivor's anecdote without her consent, nor should I have said that I accompanied her to the Police station when I did not. It was wrong of me to do so.

To survivors of sexual violence, I hope that this does not deter you from reporting your assaults. In sharing an anecdote without consent, I disregarded the principle of consent in discussions around survivors' consent and sexual assault. As a survivor myself, I feel this failure deeply.

It is important for me to take responsibility for my actions, for my error of judgement and to set the record straight.

I wish to correct the record by retracting the anecdote that I shared on 3 August and I wish to apologise to the Singapore Police Force.

LastIy, I want to apologise to the survivor whose quote I used, to the House, to my constituents, to the Workers' Party, its members and volunteers, and to my family, especially to my parents. To the residents of Sengkang, I will work even harder for you. Thank you.

Leader.

Mr Speaker, may I seek your permission to seek some clarifications from the Member?

Yes, please.

I would like to start by saying to the Member that I am very sorry to hear that she was a victim of sexual assault. I can understand that that must be very difficult and I hope that she will have the courage to be able to come through this and to be stronger as a result.

However, as the Member's statements do also disclose some rather startling disclosures – a bit of a bombshell, I might say – I do have to seek some clarifications because I need to know what exactly should follow from this disclosure. So, I hope the Member will understand and bear with me as I seek these clarifications.

The Member, as I understand it and see if I have noted what she said correctly: she said that she had shared an anecdote but in fact, she had not gone down to the Police station as she had previously described. Is that correct?

Ms Raeesah Khan.

Thank you, Leader of the House. Yes, it is correct and hence, why I am making this apology today.

Yes, I understand.

That means, can I check, because I think the Member had spoken on the Workers' Party's Motion on Empowering Women on 3 August and the Member had made this statement, "Three years ago, I accompanied a 25-year-old survivor to make a Police report against a rape that was committed against her. She came out crying. The Police officer had allegedly made comments about her dressing and the fact that she was drinking."

Hence, in the light of what the Member has just told us, that statement, at least the part about her accompanying the survivor to the Police station and what the Member allegedly saw, that part is untrue. Can the Member confirm that?

Yes, I confirm that. That was not the whole truth.

And, because later in that day, the Minister of State Desmond Tan had sought some clarifications from the Member and the Member, in her response, said, "Like I mentioned, it was three years ago and I do not wish to re-traumatise the person that I had accompanied."

Can I ask the Member to confirm that that statement: "the person that I had accompanied", was also untrue?

Yes, that was untrue. That was not the truth.

Firstly, I want to say that when I was questioned subsequently, what was going through my mind was that I wanted to protect the survivor and the people who were in the group.

Secondly, like I mentioned, it is really difficult to share a traumatic experience like this and to share that I was a part of that group in the first place.

So, I just wanted to clarify that these were the things that were going through my mind when I was answering these questions. Thank you.

I understand. I am just trying to establish the facts so that we all know exactly what transpired and then we can think a bit further of what should follow from that.

About two months later, I believe, the Member was asked by the Minister for Home Affairs for further clarification in this House. So, that would have been on 4 October 2021. This was the exchange that took place.

The Minister for Home Affairs had asked her for details. The Member had said she would like them to remain confidential and the Minister for Home Affairs had said this, "Sir, I do not understand this point about confidentiality. Can I ask through you, Sir, for Ms Khan to confirm in the House that everything she told us is accurate, that she did accompany such a person and such an incident did happen?"

And Ms Khan's answer was "Yes". Can I ask the Member to confirm that that statement when she said yes, was untrue?

It was not the truth. Yes.

Thank you. I have a few more clarifications. Please bear with me.

If I understood the Member correctly earlier, she had said that the reason and the thinking behind what she did was that she did not want to disclose publicly that she was a member of the survivors' group. Is that correct?

Yes, I did not want to disclose publicly that I was a part of a women's support group.

I understand. I want to understand from the Member why it was necessary, actually, to say those untruths because the Member could easily have related the anecdote by saying that she heard from someone who had this experience. That was all that would have been necessary to do. The Member would not have had to refer to the support group or even disclose its existence; and there would certainly have been no need to reveal that she was part of the support group.

Sir, I would like to ask the Member this: does the Member agree that it would have been possible to tell the story without reference to the support group or telling the untruth?

Thank you for those clarifications. I have been really reflecting on this episode and why I told the anecdote the way it was, and I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that I did not have my own courage to report my own assault. So, I felt very compelled to ensure that other survivors who do get the courage to report the assault to have that process done with respect and dignity.

But I recognise the Leader of the House's comments and I do recognise that it was not the right way to go about it. That is why I am here today, admitting that it was a mistake and here making a very frank apology. Thank you.

I understand that. So, I do completely empathise with the reason why the Member felt it was necessary to speak up. All I am asking is this and I am not sure that I had a response. But my question was simply this: it would have been possible to tell the story without the untruths and without referring to the survivors' group. Would the Member agree?

So, if I was unclear, I apologise. Yes, I do feel like it would have been possible. But in my haste and in my passion to advocate for survivors like myself, I did a mistake.

Right. Then, the other thing I am a bit puzzled about is this: I can understand the mistake on the spur of the moment. But the only thing is that on 3 August, I had specifically stood up in this House to remind Members of the need to substantiate allegations made. And I had said this: "I just wanted to remind Members of the House that when assertions and allegations are made, Members must be prepared to substantiate them. This is just a reminder to Members so that in future, they will understand."

So, I said that on 3 August. Two months later, when the Member was asked by the Minister for Home Affairs about this incident, which is two months' time to reflect, why did the Member then repeat the untruth?

Thank you. Like I mentioned before, I think there were two things that were going through my mind. The first was that I really wanted to protect the identity of the survivor and the survivors in the women's support group. And secondly, a lot of people did not know about this assault until very recently including my family. So, I was not ready at that point to come forward with this information. But after being able to have discussions with my family, with my friends and also informing the relevant people, it was it was clear that I wanted to make this apology; I wanted to make this personal explanation like I have done so today.

Thank you. I have to check another matter. Although the Member has retracted and apologised and, indeed, that is the correct thing to do given the circumstances that she has explained, the Member has also said that she was relating another survivor's story. This means that there still is an allegation against the Police – not the Member accompanying somebody and going down, but there is a survivor there with an allegation against the Police, which has been related to this House. That means there is still an issue of the need to substantiate the allegations.

A withdrawal and an apology do not purge or wipe out a previous failure to substantiate the allegations. What I am trying to understand and this is very important, I need to understand what the Member knew at the time the allegation was made. Is this a case where, based on what the survivor said, the Member — or let me backtrack a bit. Because when the Member was asked about it, she said, "With regard to confidentiality, I would not like to reveal any of the information." So, is this a case where, based on what the survivor said, the Member actually knows the details but did not want to disclose them because of confidentiality? Or is this a case where the Member actually does not know any of the details?

Thank you. I do not know any of the details. All I knew was what I shared in my speech on 3 August and that was an account from the survivor. I understand that it is not going to be able to be verified and hence, I have withdrawn my anecdote and apologised to the Singapore Police Force as well.

Thank you. On the confidentiality point, if I heard the Member, say, let me just check my notes for when the Member was speaking. Yes, the Member said, on confidentiality, that she should not have shared the survivor's story without her consent.

Can I ask the Member why she said that? Is it because the story was shared in confidence, that is, on the understanding that it would be kept confidential?

Yes, one of the principles of being in a women's support group is that the details should remain confidential. And that is something that I shared in my speech that I feel this failure deeply. Because I, myself, am a survivor, so, I understand what it feels like to have information out there that that I did not consent to. This has been a lesson of consent for me. And yes, like I said, it is a failure I take very deeply.

So, when the Member was asked for details in Parliament, she said that she did not want to disclose because of confidentiality. But based on what the Member has just said, actually, by that time, because the story had already been recounted, it means the Member had already breached the confidentiality to the survivor. Is that not correct?

That is correct, yes.

Just one last couple of clarifications. I think the Member ended by saying that she promised the residents of Sengkang that she would work even harder for them.

About a year ago, the Member made this promise also to the residents of Sengkang. I think this was what was reported in The Straits Times, dated 17 September 2020. The Member had said, "From these interactions, I have also learnt that as a leader, I have the power to start difficult conversations and that it is vital to frame these conversations in a considerate and accountable manner. As an MP, I hope to use the appropriate platforms to speak out on matters concerning my constituents". That was the promise made last year to the residents of Sengkang.

The Member, in the Motion on Women's Empowerment, had the platform to speak here about women's issues. The Member had the power to use her position as an MP (Member of Parliament) to advocate. Can I ask the Member that having regard to the fact that the Member has not been truthful to Parliament and not able to substantiate the allegations because the Member had no details, will the Member regard that promise last year to the residents of Sengkang to have been kept?

Thank you. Yes, I do because I am here today and I am accountable for my actions. I have apologised to the House. I have retracted the anecdote that I made and I have also apologised to the Singapore Police Force. I recognise that there was a lapse of judgement, but I am here today to apologise for it. And I think that goes back to the spirit of what I initially said a year ago.

I understand. There is a distinction, though. The Member is apologising for not having kept the promise. My question was this: that means that the promise was not kept, is that not correct?

I think one of the important parts of that post was that I would remain accountable. And I think today, here standing in Parliament, I am remaining accountable to my voters and to myself and to the principles that I wish to uphold.

I thank the Member for that. That was not quite the way it was framed, but that is all right. The way that it was framed was that it was vital to frame conversations in an accountable manner. But I thank the Member for her clarifications.

These are all the clarifications I have, Mr Speaker, and I thank the Member. But in light of what has been disclosed, it is not possible for me to leave the matter as it is and I have to raise a point of order.

I wish to raise a point of order under Standing Order 100(7)(b). The point of order is this: the Member has, by her own admission, lied to the House three times: in her original speech, in the clarifications arising from that speech, and two months later, in her response to the Minister for Home Affairs.

The Member has also confirmed that when she made the statement, she did not really have any details. That means that she was, at the time of making the statement, not able to substantiate her allegation and in fact had very little basis for doing so.

What this means is that, as a result of that, there is a cloud hanging over the Police. The Police had to go and do investigations and a lot of time and resources were spent on that. It is unfair to the Police and I think the Member has acknowledged that.

But most of all – and this really is the most distressing part – what has happened does a great disservice to the survivors of sexual assault and rape victims. The reason is this: because it is hard enough for such women, who are victims, to tell their stories and they have great difficulty in getting people to believe them sometimes. So, when relating their stories – and that is based on a lie and an inability or unwillingness to substantiate the story – it makes it that much more difficult for these women to come forward and to tell their stories. Because it is like ink in water; it spreads throughout and it casts doubt and suspicion on the stories. And it makes it that much harder for women to be believed. It undermines what we are trying to do and, especially in this year, of trying to advance women's development.

As I have said before, as Members of Parliament, we are granted privileges. One of those privileges is to be able to speak in Parliament with immunity. Unlike other people, we can do so without fear of prosecution because of the underlying public policy interest, which is, to be able to raise things. And it is very, very important when we do so, that we must be able to speak truth in this House and when we assert or make allegations, to be able to back them up.

I wish to say to the Member that I do hope that, given her past experience and what she has described and shared, she will heal. I hope that she will have time to recover from her issues on a personal level and repair relationships which, she has acknowledged, have been strained.

But the Member is also a Member of Parliament and, therefore, subject to duties and responsibilities which everyone in this House is also subject to. One of these, of course, is that when you have parliamentary privilege, you must neither breach that privilege nor abuse it.

I have great reluctance because I have sympathy for the Member's personal circumstances. But as Leader of the House, I also have a responsibility and that is: to ensure that, in this Chamber, all Members of Parliament discharge their duties faithfully and accountably and responsibly; and also that, if there are any breaches of privilege, that that has to be dealt with. I have to ensure the integrity of our Parliament because Parliament is a platform that other people look at. Singaporeans look at what we discuss here. They believe what we say. When there is untruth, it undermines the trust. Other people, the international forum and other countries look at what is discussed in this platform. What we say and what we do must be based on truth and integrity, because, again, if we do not do that, it undermines the reputation of our Parliament, our institutions and the faith that our people have in us.

Therefore, given what we have heard today, I really have no choice but to raise a complaint, under section 100(7)(b) of the Standing Orders, for breach of privilege suddenly arising based on: firstly, the disclosure by the Member that she has not been truthful or has lied to Parliament, not once, not twice, but three times; and also because she has been unable to substantiate an allegation that has been made.

These are matters which, prima facie, affect the privileges of Parliament and I, therefore, reluctantly, have to ask the matter, Mr Speaker, to be referred to the Committee of Privileges.

I am satisfied that the matter complained of, prima facie, affects the privileges of Parliament. So, pursuant to Standing Order 100(7)(b), the matter shall stand referred to the Committee of Privileges. Leader.

Mr Speaker, as I am a Member of the Committee of Privileges and as I am the complainant in this case, I would wish to recuse myself from the Committee of Privileges. Also, on behalf of Minister K Shanmugam, who has sought leave of Parliament to be absent today as he is outstation, because his Ministry is involved, he would seek to be recused from the Committee of Privileges as well.

Noted. Senior Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam.

[(proc text) "to amend the Monetary Authority of Singapore Act and the Government Securities Act in connection with reserves management", (proc text)]

[(proc text) recommendation of President signified; presented by the Senior Minister (Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam) (on behalf of the Prime Minister); read the First time; to be read a Second time at the first available Sitting of Parliament in January 2022, and to be printed. (proc text)]

[(proc text) "to amend the Prisons Act, to validate certain appointments under that Act, and to make a related amendment to the Misuse of Drugs Act", (proc text)]

[(proc text) presented by the Minister of State for Home Affairs (Assoc Prof Dr Muhammad Faishal Ibrahim) (on behalf of the Minister for Home Affairs) read the First time; to be read a Second time at the first available Sitting of Parliament in January 2022, and to be printed. (proc text)]

[(proc text) "to amend the Geographical Indications Act (2014), the Patents Act, the Plant Varieties Protection Act, the Registered Designs Act and the Trade Marks Act to facilitate certain changes to the processes for registration of intellectual property rights, standardise certain provisions across these Acts and make certain other amendments to these Acts, as well as to amend the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore Act for fines and composition sums to be paid into the Consolidated Fund", (proc text)]

[(proc text) presented by the Second Minister for Law (Mr Edwin Tong Chun Fai) read the First time; to be read a Second time at the first available Sitting of Parliament in January 2022, and to be printed. (proc text)]

[(proc text) "to amend the Legal Profession Act", (proc text)]

[(proc text) presented by the Second Minister for Law (Mr Edwin Tong Chun Fai) read the First time; to be read a Second time at the next available Sitting of Parliament in January 2022, and to be printed. (proc text)]

[(proc text) "to amend the Companies Act and the Limited Liability Partnerships Act in relation to registers of controllers of companies, foreign companies and limited liability partnerships, registers of members of foreign companies, registers of nominee directors of companies and registers of nominee shareholders of companies and foreign companies, to give effect to certain recommendations relating to the prevention of money laundering and the financing of terrorism adopted by the intergovernmental body known as the Financial Action Task Force", (proc text)]

[(proc text) presented by the Second Minister for Finance (Ms Indranee Rajah) read the First time; to be read a Second time at the first available Sitting of Parliament in January 2022, and to be printed. (proc text)]

[(proc text) "to amend the Women's Charter, to make related amendments to certain other Acts and to repeal the COVID-19 (Temporary Measures for Solemnisation and Registration of Marriages) Act 2020", (proc text)]

[(proc text) presented by the Minister of State for Social and Family Development (Ms Sun Xueling) (on behalf of the Minister for Social and Family Development) read the First time; to be read a Second time at the first available Sitting of Parliament in January 2022, and to be printed. (proc text)]

[(proc text) "to consolidate the law on levy and collection of duties on lawful betting and lotteries and to make related amendments to the Casino Control Act regarding casino taxes and casino licences, to repeal the Betting and Sweepstake Duties Act, and to make consequential amendments to certain other Acts", (proc text)]

[(proc text) recommendation of President signified; presented by the Second Minister for Finance (Ms Indranee Rajah); read the First time; to be read a Second time at the first available Sitting of Parliament in January 2022, and to be printed. (proc text)]

Order. The Clerk will now proceed to read the Orders of the Day.

[(proc text) Order for Second Reading read. (proc text)]

Mr Speaker, I beg to move, "That the Bill be now read a Second time".

Mr Speaker, the Retirement and Re-employment (Amendment) Bill is linked to the next Bill on the Order Paper, which is the Central Provident Fund (Amendment) Bill 2021. Both the Bills support our senior workers. With your permission, Mr Speaker, Sir, I would like to propose that the substantive debate on both Bills take place together.

Please proceed.

Yes. This will allow a more holistic debate. We will still have the formal Second Reading of the CPF (Amendment) Bill to ensure that procedural requirements are dealt with. So, thank you.

Singapore’s labour market is adapting to an older workforce, in tandem with demographic needs. With the support of the tripartite partners, between 2010 and 2019, we have made necessary adjustments to our employment and retirement policies, so that senior workers can continue to work beyond 65 if they wish. We started promoting the concept of re-employment in 2007 and, after extensive outreach, established the re-employment age to be 65 in 2012. We then raised the re-employment age to 67 in 2017.

These innovations in our labour market have helped allow our seniors to remain economically active. By 2020, about a quarter of our resident labour force was aged 55 and above. This is up from 16.5% a decade ago. This has helped more of our senior workers earn more and save more. With CPF LIFE, they have added assurance of a perpetual monthly income in their retirement years.

In 2018, the National Trades Union Congress (NTUC) called for a fresh effort to prepare Singapore's ageing workforce for the future. In response, we formed the Tripartite Workgroup on Older Workers (the Workgroup) to: one, review the longer-term relevance of the retirement age and re-employment age and consider our next moves; two, to examine the CPF contribution rates for senior workers and their impact on retirement adequacy; and three, to promote an inclusive workforce and progressive workplaces that value senior workers.

The Workgroup consulted extensively and presented its recommendations to the Government in 2019. One of its key recommendations was to retain the statutory retirement and re-employment age framework. Under this framework, employers cannot terminate an employee on grounds of age before the statutory retirement age. Workers have the assurance of continued employment up till the statutory re-employment age if they are able and if they wish to do so. At the same time, businesses have sufficient flexibility to adjust re-employment terms, enabling them to continue providing employment opportunities to our senior workers while remaining competitive. It was also observed from other countries' experiences that doing away with the statutory ages does not necessarily lead to higher employment rates.

The Workgroup went on to recommend increasing both the retirement age and re-employment age by three years to 65 and 70, respectively, by the end of the decade. The Workgroup had assessed this to be a realistic goal, considering improvements in health and life expectancy, the better-educated and higher-skilled workers today, as well as enhanced organisational capabilities and capacity to manage our senior workers well. Achieving this by the end of this decade also provides time for employers to adjust.

Another key recommendation of the Workgroup was to raise the CPF contribution rates for workers aged 55 to 70 over the next decade, to boost retirement adequacy for our seniors, even as we provide them with the flexibility to continue working for longer. The increases are to be phased in gradually, taking into account prevailing economic conditions. When completely implemented, the full CPF contribution rates will apply to senior workers up to age 60, compared to 55 today. The rates will step down gradually for workers above 60.

In addition, the Workgroup recommended that employers undertake complementary changes to their policies, processes and practices. Employers should engage mature and senior workers in structured career planning sessions at certain age milestones to plan their future career trajectories as well as training requirements. To encourage more age-friendly workplaces, employers should also embark on job-redesign, as well as provide more part-time re-employment opportunities.

The Government has accepted all of these recommendations.

The Bill today amends the Retirement and Re-employment Act to establish the maximum possible statutory retirement and re-employment ages at 65 and 70 respectively. This reflects the recommendations of the Tripartite Workgroup. The prevailing retirement and re-employment ages will continue to be prescribed by notification in the Gazette. In line with the consensus of the tripartite partners, the Government will prescribe the statutory retirement age and re-employment age to be 63 and 68 respectively. This will be effective from 1 July 2022, that is, next year.

Naturally, employers who wish to move faster are free to do so. In fact, the public sector has already taken the lead, by implementing a retirement age of 63 and a re-employment age of 68 one year earlier on 1 July this year.

Other recommendations of the Workgroup are also being implemented. In particular, the first increase in senior workers' CPF contribution rate will take effect from 1 January 2022. Employees aged 55 to 70 will see an increase in total CPF contribution rates of up to two percentage points. This increase was deferred by a year from the original announced timeline of 1 January 2021 as a nimble move to help employers manage costs amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. The deferment was also supported by the Labour Movement which viewed this as a balanced approach to help senior workers keep their jobs. Our ability to shift gears and to jointly focus on tackling the immediate challenges at hand while not losing sight of our longer-term vision, is a true reflection of the strength of Singapore's tripartism model. We will continue to engage our tripartite partners at each phase of rate increases over this decade.

The Government is also doing our part to help employers adjust to these changes. We introduced the $1.5 billion Senior Worker Support Package in 2020 and, through this package, we provide offsets for senior workers' wages and the additional employer CPF contributions. There are also grants to encourage employers to go one step further and raise their internal retirement and re-employment ages above the statutory ages, and to provide more part-time work options for senior workers.

Let me assure Members that raising the retirement and re-employment ages provides the flexibility for older workers to work longer, but does not compel them to do so. Those who do not wish to continue working need not do so and can enjoy their retirement. To be clear, these changes will not affect existing CPF withdrawal policies and ages. At age 55, you can still withdraw at least $5,000 and you can still start your CPF payouts from age 65 onwards.

Mr Speaker, if I may now move on to the CPF (Amendment) Bill. The Bill makes various amendments to simplify the CPF system for members.

First, we will make it easier for members to receive retirement payouts. For members who receive payouts through the Retirement Sum Scheme, some have fully drawn down their Retirement Account but still have funds in their Ordinary or Special Account. We will automatically draw down from these accounts to continue providing them a monthly payout.

For members who receive payouts through CPF LIFE, some have subsequent inflows into their Retirement Account. We will convert them into higher CPF LIFE payouts. For members turning 65 from 2023, we will give them greater flexibility to decide on when their Ordinary or Special Account savings will be transferred into their Retirement Account.

Allow me to elaborate. There are over 250,000 members currently receiving payouts under the Retirement Sum Scheme. These are members who had not opted into CPF LIFE.

Under the Retirement Sum Scheme, members stop receiving payouts once their Retirement Account is depleted. However, many members still have funds in their Ordinary or Special Account, the OSA accounts, because they continue to receive CPF inflows, such as contributions from employment. Some members are not aware that they can transfer these funds into their Retirement Account and continue to receive a monthly payout.

With this amendment, we will make it easier for them. To minimise the disruption to payouts, we will automatically stream out the Ordinary and Special Account savings of these members. This change will take effect by the first quarter of next year and will benefit about 83,000 members.

Let me illustrate with an example.

John has been receiving monthly Retirement Sum Scheme payouts of $700. He has now completely depleted his Retirement Account, but he still has $2,500 in his Ordinary and Special Account. Under current rules, this $2,500 will remain in his Ordinary and Special Account unless he comes forward to withdraw it or apply to transfer it to his Retirement Account.

With this amendment, John will continue to receive his monthly payout of $700 automatically, drawing from his Ordinary and Special Account savings. After the $2,100 has been paid out in three tranches – remember that John has $2,500 in his Ordinary and Special Account – the remaining $400 in John's Ordinary and Special Account will be disbursed to him as the final payout. If John is still working, the continued contributions to his Ordinary and Special Account will allow him to receive payouts for longer and fuss-free. John will receive the payouts when his CPF savings have accumulated to at least $250, or at least once a year if less than $250. John can also approach CPF Board or visit the CPF website to check how he can withdraw the remaining amount.

About 75,000 members are currently receiving CPF LIFE payouts. For subsequent inflows into their Retirement Account, members currently need to apply to add these inflows to their LIFE payouts. Again, we will automate this process by this month, making it easier for members to enjoy the higher payouts for life.