This year, public housing will add another 25,000 units through BTO. Together with the earlier BTO projects still in construction, public housing will need some 30,000 construction workers, largely foreigners. The latter will need to be housed, mostly via foreign workers’ dormitories. Locating the dormitories is however a tricky business. Most Singaporeans will rather they be sited miles away. This is becoming increasingly difficult.
But we need to build more flats, and quickly.
We cannot do without foreign construction workers, but we can try to build more with less, if we raise construction productivity through standardisation and pre-fabrication. This is possible if we push for higher buildability and constructability in projects, coupled with the levy and manpower policy controls and other measures in the Construction Productivity Roadmap including, for example, more extensive use of dry walls. I am optimistic that this can be done, especially with HDB’s support as the biggest building developer in town.
Read Minister for National Development, Khaw Boon Wan's full blog post here.
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