As Singaporean, we are proud of our hawker centre culture, but how many of us know that the idea of hawker centre was the result of a The Hawkers Inquiry Commission which was set up in 1950 by Governor Franklin Charles Gimson.
The inaugural public meeting of the Singapore Hawker Inquiry Commission, chaired by T. H. Silcock (Prof), was held at the Victoria Memorial Hall on 20 April 1950. The commission gathered information from the chairman of the Hawkers Association, the municipal health officer, the superintendent of the Town Cleansing Department, and a police officer. It also collected evidence from hawkers and members of the public.
The Hawkers Inquiry Report led to the formalisation of a policy to station hawkers at designated locations where they could be better controlled. It was a process that took years to implement.
The exercise to legalise hawkers through an island-wide hawkers’ registration was carried out in the 1960s. Coupled with this, the government embarked on a programme to build markets and hawker centres between 1971 and 1986.
There are currently 114 hawker centres on our island, of which 13 are manage by social enterprise entities: Fei Siong Food Management, NTUC Foodfare, Timbre Group, Hawker Management under Koufu, and OTHM under Kopitiam.
The idea of social enterprise managed hawker centre came from a Public Consultation Panel on Hawker Centres in 2011. The panel submitted several recommendations, including the proposal to have hawker centres “operated on a not-for-profit basis by social enterprises or cooperatives”.
Recently, the social enterprise managed hawker centre model has come under scrutiny after food critic and consultant K F Seetoh and some hawkers operating in these centres raised concerns over high rentals and additional fees which lack transparency.
Several hawkers who operate in Jurong West Hawker Centre, a centre manage by Koufu’s social enterprise subsidiary Hawker Management, had earlier petitioned against a 20-cent charge per tray return saying that the practice was costing them up to S$900 per month.
After a public backlash, Hawker Management said on last Thursday it would make customers at Jurong West Hawker Centre pay a 20-cent returnable deposit instead.
In a post on her Facebook page on Friday (Oct 19), Senior Minister of State for the Environment and Water Resources Amy Khor said she has asked the agency to “quickly iron out the problems”, especially on costs and contractual terms used by operators.
Dr Khor said that having the social enterprises run hawker centres is one way the authorities are trying to “address the many challenges of the hawker trade such as renewal and manpower constraints, and at the same time meet the evolving dining needs of residents”.
These social enterprises are given some flexibility to try “different ideas and innovative practices”.
“We will continue to fine-tune the management model, to safeguard the interests of Singaporeans — patrons and hawkers — and achieve the objective of ensuring that Singaporeans have access to affordable food and hawkers can make a decent living,” she wrote.
68 years after the idea of Hawker Centre was conceived, it is still serving our demand for cheap, yummy and affordable hawker food while providing opportunity for small time business owners.
Let us see how our authorities balance the need for affordable hawker food and ensuring “decent” living for hawkers!
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