PM Lee Hsien Loong at the Launch of One Connect

"One Connect – Connecting Everyone"

Mdm Lorina Law
Organising Committee Chairman

Grassroots leaders

Friends and residents

Good afternoon everybody. I am very happy to here at Greenwich V, and to launch our One Connect project. We are launching One Connect@Ang Mo Kio-Sengkang West today. You may not have heard of One Connect but let me tell you what it is. It is a hotline, a telephone number, to help private estate residents if you have maintenance problems. It is also a way for us to run programmes which will be able to work with private residents and get you together.

We have a lot more people living in private estates today. Already about 270,000 private flats, houses, condos, compared to only 200,000 maybe about ten years ago. And in Ang Mo Kio GRC itself, we have about 13,000 private flats and condos and houses. These residents in the private estates are part of our community and we would like them to be also engaged the same way as we can work with the HDB residents, and engage them. That is why we have the Neighbourhood Committee (NC) scheme, the NC scheme, to promote community bonding, just like in the HDB estates we have the RC scheme. And today we have 124 NCs all over Singapore. So PA supports the NCs, with resources, with help, with ideas. And we have a NC Coordinating Unit to oversee this, and we have dialogues with the residents, and we do exercises, projects, like the Nation-wide Emergency Preparedness exercise.

One problem which the private residents have, which I am sure you will be very familiar, is maintenance of the public outdoor areas – the roads, the drains, the footpaths, the greenery along the roads. HDB residents also have these public areas to look after, but in the case of the HDB, if there is any problem, you ring up the Town Council, Town Council will do everything for you. Whether it is PUB, LTA, NParks, it does not matter, Town Council will see to it. But if you are in a private estate, there is no Town Council, so you must know who is who. If the road needs to be repaired, you go to LTA. If the drain needs to be repaired, you must go to PUB. If you want to trim the tree down, then it depends. Whose land is the tree growing on? For example, I do not know whose tree this is. This one belongs to Far East. But if it is on government land, then go to NParks maybe, go to SLA maybe, go to LTA maybe, and so it can be quite time consuming and frustrating to make telephone calls and get shuttled from one agency to another. So three years ago, in Ang Mo Kio, we piloted a programme to make it easier for the residents of private estates to sort these problems out. And we made a one-stop hotline -1800-2255 123 (1800-CALL 123). So you just call this number, and there is an officer there who will answer the phone, and he will talk to the relevant agencies and sort it out if he can, and track the follow-up and make sure it is resolved. The exercise was quite successful, the hotline over these three years have handled about 700 cases, about one daily. About three quarters of these involve maintenance issues, like pruning trees, clearing drains, and then the other one quarter were suggestions about upgrading and improving the estates. And they had some interesting projects, for example, they worked with AVA and Cat Welfare Society, to educate residents not to feed stray cats, or at least to feed them responsibly and to manage the cat population - this was in Kebun Baru Villas. It also worked with LTA to reduce illegal parking of trucks and other vehicles along Jalan Kayu and Jalan Tari Lilin, which is just near here. So having worked it for three years and found it useful, we asked PA and the government if we could continue this project. So after studying it, they said yes, they will continue it, we will make this a permanent scheme, and furthermore, we will do this progressively in other estates as well. So we will now have One Connect in Ang Mo Kio and Sengkang permanently, which I think is a relief for all the residents in the private estates.

But we will do more to help to serve the residents. First, we will establish a Taskforce for One Connect Programme here, which Mr Inderjit Singh and Mr Ang Hin Kee will be chairing together. It will have representatives from all the NCs, and their job is to look for matters which come up from the hotline, to understand the needs and concerns of the residents, improve the environment and do other programmes which will be useful for the private estates - community dialogues, street parties, interest groups, and so on.

So I hope the residents will support the One Connect project, will support the Taskforce, and work together to build a more harmonious and cohesive community.

Secondly, we are going to share One Connect success with other constituencies. So from One Connect, it is going to become connecting many. We will encourage other NCs elsewhere in Singapore, to adopt features of the One Connect programme. So for example in Moulmein-Kallang and Whampoa, the NCs are going to set up a Taskforce in their estates, but they are going to give it their own brand name – we have already called ours One Connect so they cannot use this name – so they are going to call it HOPE, HOtline for Private Estates. So I hope they do well, and I hope many more constituencies do this.

So thank you PA, thank you to the NCs and all the activists for doing a good job engaging private residents. Thank you Lorina and all your activists for organising today’s function and making sure we have beautiful weather today, and we launch the project now, make use of it, work together with one another and make this place a happy place to live.

Thank you very much.