Flexibility to Spend Community Development Council Vouchers at Small Businesses
Ministry of FinanceSpeakers
Summary
This question concerns the flexibility of spending the supermarket portion of Community Development Council (CDC) vouchers at heartland businesses to support small merchants. Mr Leong Mun Wai inquired why the $150 designated for supermarkets could not be spent at small businesses that might benefit more from household expenditure. Deputy Prime Minister Mr Lawrence Wong explained that the 2023 tranche was split to meet public demand, noting that supermarket voucher utilization is currently higher. He added that some residents have requested converting heartland vouchers for supermarket use, though the government will maintain current parameters for now. The government will review these experiences when determining the fourth tranche of CDC vouchers due in January 2024.
Transcript
1 Mr Leong Mun Wai asked the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance why is flexibility not being given to Singaporeans to spend the $150 Community Development Council vouchers for supermarkets at small businesses that may benefit more from the increased expenditure by households than the large supermarket chains.
Mr Lawrence Wong: Since December 2021, the Government has disbursed three tranches of the digital CDC Vouchers to help Singaporean households with their daily expenses. The first two tranches of $100 each were restricted to participating heartland merchants and hawkers, precisely to support heartland businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since then, however, there have been many requests from Singaporeans for their CDC Vouchers to be used at supermarkets. Hence we split the coverage of the third tranche of vouchers in January 2023 equally between supermarkets and heartland businesses, to better meet the needs of Singaporean families.
The third tranche of CDC Vouchers are valid till the end of the year, but the data to date indicates that utilisation of the supermarket vouchers is higher than the vouchers for heartland businesses. In fact, there have also been requests from members of the public to allow flexibility for their unused vouchers for heartland businesses to be extended to supermarkets.
For now, we will continue to maintain the parameters of the scheme. We will review from this experience what we might do for the fourth tranche of CDC Vouchers due in January next year.