Review of Liabilities and Penalties under Workplace Safety and Health Act

10 Mr Desmond Choo asked the Minister for Manpower (a) whether the Ministry will review the current liabilities and penalties under the Workplace Safety and Health Act; and (b) how can the Ministry further improve the workplace safety competency of companies and their workers.

The Minister of State for Manpower (Mr Sam Tan Chin Siong) (for the Minister for Manpower: Madam, MOM conducts regular reviews of the Workplace Safety and Health Act (WSHA) to keep it relevant. Since its enactment in 2006, it was amended in 2008 and 2011. We have started a third review since earlier this year and aim to complete it before the end of the year.

Mdm Speaker, safety competency is a function of enforcement, awareness and training. On enforcement, MOM conducts more than 16,000 inspections per year, as mentioned earlier just now. These inspections resulted in companies taking remedial actions to rectify any safety gaps found in their worksites. On awareness, the Workplace Safety and Health Council, where SNEF and NTUC are represented, has conducted education programmes reaching out to 500,000 workers a year. On training, more than 150,000 workers undergo safety training every year. The Workplace Safety and Health Council is also partnering SkillsFuture Singapore to enhance the Workplace Safety and Health (WSH) training curriculum of workers, supervisors and managers over the next two years. The Council also has the bizSAFE and CultureSAFE initiatives for companies, which build WSH management capabilities and foster a stronger culture of WSH. As of 2016, over 27,000 companies have benefited from these programmes.

Mdm Speaker, I would like to stress that WSH is everyone's collective responsibility. We encourage members of the public to also play an active role to report any unsafe work practices by calling or emailing MOM or using our Snap@MOM mobile application to report any unsafe worksite practices.

Mr Desmond Choo (Tampines): Madam, I just want to check what is the larger strategic direction for future changes and what can we expect from the most current review that MOM is conducting.

Mr Sam Tan Chin Siong: Mdm Speaker, I thank the Member for the questions.

The larger strategic direction taken by MOM is four-fold. Firstly, we would like to create widespread awareness on WSH across the industry down to the workers, from management to the workers. So, creating awareness is one plank. The second plank is to step up the training to build worker, management and line supervisors' capability on WSH. The third is to continue with sustained enforcement actions and inspections at the different worksites. Whenever there are areas identified to be of higher risk because of new situations, we will calibrate our enforcement regime to make sure that we will pay closer attention on those higher risk sectors. Lastly, the penalty. From time to time, we will assess the situation and needs. When it is meritorious, we will consider stiffening the penalties, which we have done in the last one year or so.

With regard to the second supplementary question by the Member on what the proposed changes in the current review are, the proposed changes aim to strengthen industry ownership and also to enhance deterrence. This includes strengthening tripartite ownership for WSH. We think that it is important for the Government, the union and also the employers to come together to collectively tackle the WSH situation in Singapore. So, collective ownership, tripartite ownership, is one area where we are looking into. And the second area of review is facilitating the public release of incident learning reports on the root causes and recommendations of incidents with higher learning value. This is done so as to prevent recurrence of similar accidents.

The last area of review is to increase the maximum penalty under the WSH Act's subsidiary legislation for offences that could result in serious injuries or even death. This is still being evaluated and we will release more details when the review is finished by the end of this year.