Percentage of Hawker Centres with Centralised Dishwashing Services

20 Mr Louis Ng Kok Kwang asked the Minister for Sustainability and the Environment (a) for each year in the past five years, how many and what percentage of hawker centres have centralised dishwashing services; and (b) whether an update can be provided on the steps the Ministry will take to further increase the use of centralised dishwashing services.

Ms Grace Fu Hai Yien: Of the 111 hawker centres, 16 have implemented Centralised Dishwashing (CDW) services. These include all the eight Socially-Conscious Enterprise Hawker Centres, as well as eight hawker centres that have leveraged the Productive Hawker Centres (PHC) programme to adopt CDW services as well as other centre-level productivity solutions. Some stallholders at other hawker centres have also taken the initiative to adopt ad-hoc CDW services with their cleaning contractors as it helps to improve productivity.

Support from the Hawkers' Associations (HAs) and stallholders' buy-in are critical factors for the adoption of the PHC programme and CDW services. To support stallholders to adopt CDW services, the National Environment Agency (NEA) provides transitional subsidies under the PHC programme. For existing hawker centres, these include subsidising 70% of the CDW fees for the first two years, 50% for the third year and 30% for the fourth year. CDW services will also be implemented at all new hawker centres and subsidies of 50% and 30% of CDW fees are extended to stallholders for the first and second year respectively.