Around 1,150 stallholders have benefitted from NEA's Hawkers' Productivity Grant

Around 1,150 stallholders at hawker centres have benefitted from the National Environment Agency's (NEA) Hawkers' Productivity Grant (HPG) as of 31 December 2025, Minister for Sustainability and the Environment Grace Fu Hai Yien disclosed in a written reply to Parliament on Thursday.

The figures were provided in response to a question filed by Workers' Party MP for Sengkang GRC Mr Abdul Muhaimin Abdul Malik, who sought details on the grant's current uptake, whether NEA tracks individual adoption of automation and digital solutions, and what further plans exist to encourage hawkers to embrace technology as a means of reducing overhead costs.

Ms Fu confirmed that approximately 1,100 cooked food stallholders and 50 market stallholders had drawn on the HPG, which provides co-funding for qualifying automation equipment and digital service solutions. Separately, she noted that about two-thirds of all stalls now accept e-payment solutions, a metric that speaks to the broader — if uneven — pace of digital uptake across the sector.

The Minister did not provide the requested breakdown of adoption rates by specific category of automation or digital tool, such as e-ordering systems, queue management platforms, or kitchen management software. The written reply did not address whether NEA intends to introduce more granular tracking of such adoption in future.

The HPG, launched in 2017, allows eligible stallholders to claim up to 80 per cent of equipment unit cost, excluding GST, on a reimbursement basis, subject to a cap of $7,000 per claimant.

To qualify, a stallholder must hold a valid Tenancy Agreement with NEA or an NEA-appointed operator, with a remaining tenancy term of at least one year. Applications under the current grant framework are open until 31 March 2026.

Beyond the HPG, Ms Fu outlined the complementary role of NEA's Productive Hawker Centres (PHC) programme, which is designed to facilitate the transition to automated solutions that raise productivity at the centre level rather than at individual stalls.

The flagship initiative under the PHC framework is centralised dishwashing — a system that eliminates the need for manual washing by individual hawkers, reducing manpower requirements and mitigating crockery inventory issues such as loss or damage.

Under the PHC programme, stallholders at participating centres receive stepped subsidies on centralised dishwashing fees. Ms Fu said the programme provides "funding support of up to 70 per cent of centralised dishwashing fees for four years in existing hawker centres, and up to 50 per cent for two years in new hawker centres."

As of 31 December 2025, all 16 new hawker centres built after 2011, as well as 10 existing hawker centres, had implemented centralised dishwashing under the programme — bringing the total to 26 centres islandwide.

The Government's subsidy structure under the PHC programme is designed as a step-down arrangement, with stallholders bearing progressively higher shares of dishwashing costs as the subsidy period matures, before eventually taking on the full cost.

The intent, as articulated in NEA's framework, is to acclimatise hawkers to the productivity benefits of the system before the financial assistance tapers off.

Ms Fu closed her reply by indicating that NEA would "continue to review its programmes to support stallholders in adopting technological solutions," a signal that the current instruments — the HPG and PHC — may be subject to further calibration, though no specific enhancements or new schemes were announced.

The questions posed by Mr Abdul Muhaimin reflect a broader industry concern: that while digital and automation infrastructure has expanded, the pace of uptake among older or less digitally confident hawkers remains uneven.

The HPG's reimbursement-based model — which requires stallholders to purchase qualifying equipment upfront before claiming co-funding — has been identified in some quarters as a structural barrier, particularly for hawkers with limited working capital. The Ministry did not address this dynamic in Thursday's reply.