I refer to Mr Leon Perera’s letter, “Govt should remain focused on HDB flat affordability and accessibility” (Feb 16).

I agree with Mr Perera that the Government should focus on building flats. That is precisely what the Government has been doing.

However, that should not preclude an honest scrutiny of proposals which the Workers’ Party (WP) and the Government put forward.

The WP said in 2019 that the Government should build no more than 9,000 Build-To-Order (BTO) flats a year. The Government was building 16,000 to 17,000 flats a year then. The WP wanted this drastically and immediately reduced. It said that otherwise, there could be a “vacancy rate problem” and “resale market uncertainty”.

We now know that the WP’s proposal would have caused a severe shortage of flats and much longer waiting times.

Mr Perera now says the WP had intended that the reduction to 9,000 BTO flats per year would be supplemented by older flats acquired under its proposed Universal Sale and Lease Back (USB) Scheme.

But this explanation directly contradicts WP chief Pritam Singh’s recent statement that the Government should have built more BTO flats (which in turn also contradicts the 2019 WP proposal to build fewer BTO flats).

If, in Mr Perera’s view, a reduction to 9,000 BTO flats a year would not have been a problem, then why is Mr Singh now saying that the Government should have built more than the 16,000 to 17,000 BTO flats it had built per year?

Also, it will be 12 years before any HDB flat is old enough to qualify for the USB Scheme. So neither Mr Perera (nor anyone else) could have believed that the USB flats would supplement the BTO supply in the near term. His explanation does not wash. The WP wanted to reduce the supply of BTO flats immediately because it believed (erroneously) that an oversupply was imminent.

The WP proposal made in 2019 was a serious mistake. The honest thing to do is to admit this, instead of trying to explain it away, or criticising the Government for not building even more flats while glossing over its own proposal to cut back the BTO programme.

Henry Kwek
MP for Kebun Baru SMC