(Re)defining Municipal Services Office's Duties

26 August 2014

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said at the National Day Rally on 17 August (edited):

"One area where we can do better is getting all our different agencies to work more closely together, especially when their responsibilities overlap with one another or are split between different agencies.

"Mayor Low Yen Ling's residents had complained that the walkway to Bukit Gombak MRT Station was often dirty. One resident told her he saw a fishball stick there on the walkway. The next day, he came back, he looked, and the same fishball stick was still in the same place. So Yen Ling called up the agencies to find out why the area was not being cleared regularly and she had to make multiple calls to several agencies, held several meetings, finally, she managed to establish what happened.

"It is not the way we should be operating and we have to do better to bridge these inter-agency boundaries and to serve the public in an integrated way.

"So we will set up a Municipal Services Office — one authority to coordinate all of the agencies: LTA, PUB, NParks, the whole lot, and single-mindedly focus on service delivery. I will appoint Minister Grace Fu to oversee this Municipal Services Office. So more details will be announced later, please be patient. We are going in the right direction. We are determined to do better and I think Grace will do a good job."

According to TODAY (Municipal Office 'Not Catch-All Body, But For Complex Cases', 25 Aug 2014), Ms Fu said one week later:

The MSO is not intended to be an omnibus body for the public to direct all their feedback for forwarding to the various government agencies.

The MSO is the place to turn to mainly for complex cases in which the public is unsure whom to call. If the public already knows that a certain area is done by a certain agency, there is no need to relearn another number (MSO's) or for a bureaucracy to pull these services into a central unit.

MND estimates about 10 to 15 per cent of all feedback various government agencies get on municipal issues involves multiple agencies, or residents approaching the wrong agencies. But the status quo remains for clear-cut cases, so the MSO doesn't create another layer nor delay the process.

Was that what Mr Lee was thinking when he decided to set up MSO?

Ms Fu should ask Ms Low whether she had, at the outset, imagined that getting a fishball stick removed by the authorities was such a complex matter.