Mr Tan Meng Dui
Chief Executive Officer

This Financial Year (FY), HDB pressed on to ensure the continued delivery of homes to Singaporeans amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, while providing a steady supply of new flats to meet future housing needs.

Guided by our Designing for Life roadmap, which places the holistic well-being of our residents at its core, we remain committed to building affordable, quality homes for Singaporeans and thriving communities in the heartlands.

Delivering Homes Amidst Disruptions

A key focus in the FY was to minimise construction delays and deliver homes to flat buyers while ensuring that safety and building quality are not compromised, so that our flat buyers can move into their new homes with as little delay and disruption as possible.

To support HDB’s contractors in completing the Build-To-Order (BTO) projects, we worked closely with them to address problems early and secure the resources needed — from manpower to materials — to complete construction works. We also rolled out an extensive suite of assistance measures to ease their financial pressures, such as extending the period of protection against steel price fluctuations and co-sharing the increase in manpower costs.

HDB also stepped in quickly to facilitate the novation of several BTO projects affected by the liquidation of Greatearth Corporation and Greatearth Construction to new contractors with the capacity and experience to complete the remaining works, in an effort to minimise the extent of delays for affected flat buyers. As at the end of FY2021, 2 of the 5 affected Greatearth projects — Senja Ridges and Senja Heights — have been completed and handed over to buyers ahead of the revised project probable completion dates.

Beyond minimising construction delays, our commitment to affected flat buyers also extends to offering assistance and support as best as we can. These include provision of alternative housing arrangements, waiver of forfeitures, and providing compensation for those whose flats are delayed beyond the Delivery Possession Date. We continue to monitor our project construction closely, and will keep in touch with our buyers to keep them updated on progress and timelines.

Meeting Strong Demand for Affordable Flats

With the construction industry gradually recovering, HDB will continue to launch new public housing projects to meet the current strong demand and to ensure there is a home for every budget and need.

In FY2021, we launched about 17,300 BTO flats. New flats launched this FY include those in Rochor and Kallang/ Whampoa, under the new Prime Location Public Housing (PLH) model. The PLH model ensures that public housing in these prime, central locations will be affordable, accessible, and inclusive.

We are also prepared to offer up to 100,000 new flats in total from 2021 to 2025 if needed, to meet strong housing demand. These include thousands of new homes in newly announced housing areas, such as Ulu Pandan, Mount Pleasant, and Keppel Club.

Our new flats continue to be priced with generous subsidies, with various priority schemes and grants in place to help HDB buyers afford their homes and support residents with housing needs. Most first-timers buying new flats in non-mature estates only need to use less than a quarter of their monthly income to service their HDB loans. HDB is committed to ensuring that public housing remains affordable and within reach for Singaporeans.

Further Push on Construction Productivity and Resilience

As HDB continues our transformation journey, we will give further push on our construction productivity and resilience.

To complement existing precast resilience strategies such as stockpiling and local storage, we are strengthening our construction processes and supply chain by localising more precast component production. We have also been adopting innovative technologies such as Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA), Integrated Digital Delivery, and automation to further enhance construction productivity.

For projects completed in 2021, HDB achieved an overall productivity improvement of 26.2%, compared to the base year of 2010. We will continue to seek out new ways to achieve greater construction productivity and strengthen our construction resilience, as we build quality flats to meet the increased housing demand.

Moving Into a New Post-COVID Future

As we work hard to ensure a smooth landing on our building programme, we will also build on the momentum to meet emerging needs in a post-COVID world. While HDB has been continuously improving the way we plan and design our towns and homes, the pandemic has presented us with many opportunities to think bolder and push housing frontiers.

For instance, the Health District @ Queenstown, which we announced in FY2021, will enable us to pilot designs that are centred around health and wellness. To help our residents there live healthily within their community, we will testbed cross-cutting science-based initiatives in the built environment, and progressively scale them to benefit residents in all our HDB towns and estates.

On the sustainability front, we rolled out several green and smart solutions under the HDB Green Towns Programme so that we can deliver a liveable and sustainable living environment for our residents. This FY, we piloted the application of cool paint at HDB blocks in Tampines to reduce ambient temperatures, as well as announced plans to install Urban Water Harvesting Systems in Yishun and Jurong to better use rainwater in our common areas.

Our construction industry is still not out of the woods, and supply chain disruptions may still continue to arise. Nevertheless, we will maintain our razor-sharp focus on keeping our building programme on track, while catering to the evolving and diverse needs of Singaporeans. Moving into a new post-COVID future, we will continue to remain agile, bold, and collaborative, so that we can deliver the best possible homes to Singaporeans.