SPEECH BY MINISTER CHEE HONG TAT AT BUILDSG LEAD SUMMIT 2026

Colleagues and friends, ladies and gentlemen, a very good morning. I am happy to join everyone here today at the BuildSG LEAD Summit 2026.

The Built Environment sector, or BE sector in short, is critical for Singapore’s continued growth and prosperity. It provides the physical foundation for our economy and communities to thrive – shaping not just our homes and workplaces, but the shared public spaces where Singaporeans gather and bond with one another.

Navigating Global Uncertainties

The ongoing conflict in the Middle East has unfortunately impacted many sectors of our economy, including the BE sector through rising costs of diesel and bitumen.

Earlier this month, we announced that the Government will co-share 50% of the cost increases that contractors incur due to additional diesel and bitumen costs for critical public sector projects. I would like to once again, strongly urge our private sector developers to provide similar support to your contractors.

Like what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic, this crisis that we are currently experiencing is global and all countries are affected. But the key is how we respond to it. Do we help one another to tide through the difficult times? Do we have the determination and a “never say die” attitude to tough it out and overcome what comes our way? These are the factors that people will look at when observing how Singapore responds, and that will shape their view of us as a country, as a society, and whether the confidence level goes up or down after the crisis.

So it is important for us to walk this journey together and support one another in solidarity, so that Singapore can overcome the challenges and emerge more united and more resilient when the crisis is over.

Updates on Action Team

Earlier this year, we formed the Action Team to Improve Built Environment Productivity. We brought together government representatives and stakeholders from across the BE sector, including developers, consultants, contractors, facility managers and academics.

We held our first meeting earlier this month, where we engaged in candid and constructive discussions, focusing on possible policy and process improvements that can help our companies to save cost, time and manpower across the entire building lifecycle, from design and construction, to facilities management and maintenance.

We have identified four key areas to work on.

First, we will improve industry practices to help lift productivity and encourage investments in innovation. For instance, we will encourage greater adoption of collaborative contracting, which will provide fairer sharing of risks and gains from innovative approaches between the contract parties.

Second, we will optimise project management and operations to unlock further productivity gains. Our Action Team members have highlighted some areas where requirements imposed by regulators or developers have unintentionally led to project inefficiencies. We are studying how to streamline these areas, while maintaining good operational and safety outcomes.

Third, we will strengthen capability development to address skills gaps and manpower shortages. We need to continue strengthening our talent pipeline, and also to scale up the adoption of robotics and AI technologies. Today’s Summit, which is centred around technology and AI, is a step in the same direction.

Fourth, we will enhance supply chain management to achieve cost savings and resilience. For example, we will encourage greater adoption of design standardisation, to enable source diversification and help firms better manage cost and improve supply resilience.

We intend to provide regular updates on the Action Team’s progress, and implement the various proposals in phases along the way. As I explained yesterday at an MND event with our partners, a better approach would be not to wait until the entire review is over and then start implementing, because that could take a while. It is better for us to identify which are the proposals that we are ready to move and implement those first, while we continue to study those that need more time. This morning, I would like to take the opportunity to share some of our initial moves.

Streamlined Process to Bring in New Construction Workers

First, the industry has given feedback that overseas testing of prospective construction workers prolongs the time needed to bring in new workers, and that workers’ skills and certification often do not match the needs of their eventual deployment. There is therefore a lot of friction and inefficiencies in the current arrangement.

Given the strong construction demand in the coming years, it is important that we find ways to facilitate a smoother and more expedient inflow of skilled new construction workers, and to ensure better job-skills fit.

From January 2027, BCA will cease the overseas testing for new construction work permit holders from China and Thailand. From January 2028, we will remove the overseas testing requirement for all source countries, to give firms sufficient time to adjust their recruitment processes. With this change, firms will be able to bring new workers in and test them locally in Singapore, instead of doing overseas testing in the source countries before the workers enter Singapore.

To further facilitate the recruitment of skilled workers, BCA will partner the industry to scale up the Alternative Entry Pathway Programme, which allows firms to bring in new workers who have obtained foreign vocational certifications or can demonstrate the required skills on par with prevailing entry standards.

To maintain the quality of new workers coming in, BCA will work with MOM to impose higher levy rates for new workers who are not certified within the first six months after Work Permit issuance. The higher levy rates will kick in after this six-month grace period is over. What we want to achieve is the outcome where we incentivise firms to train and to certify your workers in a timely manner, so that they can be deployed quickly to job roles that match their training. To be clear, if you do so within the first six months, the higher levy rates will not kick in. The higher levy rates only kick in if you fail to get them trained and certified after six months.

These changes will significantly reduce hiring timelines from the current four months to about one month, and enable better matching between workers’ skills and job requirements, while giving our firms greater flexibility in meeting their project needs. Taken together, they will provide a more responsive and productive workforce pipeline for the BE sector.

This change is something which we have discussed with our industry partners and they have given us their support. It is a change of a policy that has been in place for quite some time, I think almost 20 years. I want to highlight that while we continue to review some of the policies, for the Action Team, together with our industry partners, when we identify areas that need to change, we are prepared to make some of these bolder moves. We are prepared to make some of these changes that can push the boundaries, if we believe that these changes will benefit the industry, improve productivity, and help you to save time, costs and manpower.

Unlocking Greater Productivity through Design Standardisation

The next point that I want to share with everyone is how we can unlock greater productivity through design standardisation. We have made good progress in improving productivity through the adoption of prefabrication technologies and Design for Manufacturing and Assembly. We want to build on this momentum, because we expect that the next phase of productivity gains, part of it will have to come from greater design standardisation across projects.

This is why we are advancing the Kit-of-Parts approach, or what some people call the “Lego bricks approach”, to standardise precast components across projects of similar typologies. By adopting a common set of building components, firms can benefit from greater efficiencies in manufacturing and assembly. The Kit-of-Parts approach will allow projects to diversify the sourcing for standard precast components and boost supply resilience across the value chain.

To encourage developers to adopt the Kit-of-Parts approach at the programme level across similar project typology, BCA will introduce a new Buildability Type Approval pathway, which will take effect from today.

Currently, developers are required to submit separate applications for each building project to BCA to meet the requirements under the Buildability and Constructability Frameworks.

Moving forward, developers who adopt the Kit-of-Parts approach at the programme level will only need to submit one Design Standardisation Plan and a catalogue of standardised components. This is essentially a “bao kar liao” approach that meets BCA’s Buildability and Constructability requirements. In other words, once the developer’s proposal is accepted by BCA, project teams from this developer need not submit new Buildability and Constructability applications for individual projects adopting Kit-of-Parts subsequently. You do it once, and once the proposal is accepted, you need not have to submit again.

We hope that this will bring about two benefits. First, projects that are on the new Buildability Type Approval pathway can save around 320 man hours per project from the streamlined process. Second, adopting the Kit-of-Parts approach will help to reduce manufacturing costs for precast components by at least 10% and manpower by at least 20%, enabling greater cost, time and manpower savings at the project level.

The Government has taken the lead to adopt the Kit-of-Parts approach. Standardisation is not new to HDB. HDB has been doing this and they want to go further, they want to explore ways that can further standardise precast components across the pipeline of BTO projects. This can help to enhance build quality, raise construction productivity, and strengthen resilience across projects.

Building on these efforts, HDB is currently developing an Enhanced Precast Component Catalogue covering a comprehensive range of standard precast components. The standard precast components in the catalogue will be used by HDB’s project partners across HDB’s projects, such as BTO flats and multistorey car parks.

The catalogue will help HDB to unlock the next bound of productivity gains and greater supply resilience, with established specifications such as standard dimensions, material content, and connection details. This will enable greater supply resilience, reducing project delays due to supply disruptions.

It will also allow varying extents of standardisation to provide design flexibility to create distinct BTO projects and HDB towns, while maintaining high quality across the different projects. I want to assure our designers and architects that we are not going for cookie-cutter type of designs. We still want you to give us good designs, designs that have distinctive identities across different projects and different towns. But we believe we can achieve this together with standardisation of some of the components. The two are not mutually exclusive, they can go hand-in-hand.

HDB is engaging the relevant industry stakeholders on the enhanced catalogue, and we will share more details with everyone later this year.

BCA is also working closely with other public agencies, such as MOE, LTA, MOH Holdings and JTC, to drive the adoption of the Kit-of-Parts approach for the construction of schools, transport infrastructure, healthcare institutions, industrial estates and worker dormitories.

On schools and commuter facilities such as bus shelters and covered linkways, MOE and LTA are working with BCA to enhance design standardisation. We will give this a push. For healthcare projects, MOH Holdings has developed Healthcare Facility Design Standards, which are expected to shorten hospital project delivery timelines. For industrial projects, JTC has included the development of Kit-of-Parts solutions as part of their consultancy tenders. As land sales agents for worker dormitories, BCA and JTC have also released three land sales tenders specifying adoption of the Kit-of-Parts approach. Future land sales tenders will similarly specify such adoption.

I want to commend our agencies for embarking on these initiatives. This is a useful start, and we will work with them to scale up these efforts, and to encourage further, wider adoption across public sector agencies.

We will also review how we can incentivise more private sector developers to adopt the Kit-of-Parts approach. BCA will work with our developers on this, to get your ideas and feedback, so that we can co-create a set of incentives that will fit well with your commercial and operational needs. We want to support and encourage you to adopt the Kit-of-Parts approach.

I believe this collaboration can help us to unlock the next bound of our productivity gains together.

Encouraging Open Feedback and Suggestions

Let me move on to another important area that is driving the transformation of our BE sector, and that is to encourage open and constructive feedback and suggestions from the industry.

Earlier this year, I spoke about allowing for two-way feedback between consultancy firms and government agencies, to foster a fairer system. In other words, not only have government agencies rate the consultants and provide feedback on their work, we also want to encourage consultants to rate and provide feedback on the government agencies they work with.

Last month, BCA rolled out an ad-hoc feedback channel on its website, to allow firms to raise general project issues, particularly when quicker responses or follow-ups are required.

We will introduce a new annual rating survey for consultancy firms to rate and provide constructive feedback on public sector agencies that they are working with. BCA will collate feedback through the survey without attributing it to any specific firm, so that the firms can be assured that the survey will be a safe channel for you to share your experiences openly and provide candid feedback.

This will go hand-in-hand with our Consultants Performance Appraisal System, where public sector agencies assess consultancy firms’ project performance.

BCA will send out the rating survey forms to firms working on ongoing public sector projects starting from next month. And firms, we hope you can take about up to a month to submit your feedback and your ratings.

I would like to encourage all consultancy firms to make good use of this new feedback platform to help us identify areas for improvement. I want to be clear, so that everyone is aware why we are doing this. We are not trying to promote a more confrontational working relationship. In fact, we are trying to look for ways in which we can learn and improve. And the best way to do this is to be open to genuine and constructive feedback. So if there are areas for improvement, please tell us, so that we know where are these gaps and how we can do better. Likewise, I hope our consultants are also open to the government agencies sharing with you their feedback, so that if there are any gaps at your end, you can also improve and you can also see how we can enhance the processes.

In this way, we help each other to be able to embark on this continuous process of improvement, so that we can improve productivity for the whole sector over time. We take it in the right spirit; this is not about complaining about one another, because we do want to promote a more collaborative relationship. But a collaborative relationship does not mean that we do not provide feedback to one another, and we do not share candidly how we think we can do better. True collaboration is not about just saying nice things. True collaboration has to include the openness and the willingness to listen to feedback, even though some of them may not be positive feedback, but they are constructive feedback to help us to improve.

I hope everyone takes this in the right spirit, both the government agencies and our industry. This is what we are trying to achieve and this is the tool that we hope will enable all of us to work together, to achieve those continuous improvements.

Conclusion

Let me conclude my speech. The Government remains committed to supporting our BE sector, as it navigates current challenges and adapts to a changing global landscape. We will continue to engage closely with all of you, our industry partners, listen to your feedback, and implement practical measures that make a meaningful difference on the ground, to you and your colleagues.

By working hand in hand, I believe we can overcome uncertainties and position the BE sector to seize new opportunities, both here and overseas. Together, we can build a sector that is more productive, more innovative and more resilient. If I may add, a sector that can also attract more younger people to join us, because they see meaning and purpose in the important work that we do.
And they can relate to the important investments that we are making in raising our capabilities, including in technology, AI, robotics and automation. And also our efforts to continue to improve our sustainability, to make our buildings greener and more sustainable.

These are all very important and exciting areas, that if we can work together, we can present to our younger stakeholders. Some of them have joined the workforce, some of them may still be in school, some of them have not yet decided what course they want to choose. But if we can present this vision and this more inspiring future that we want to build together and show them how they can contribute to this shared future, I hope that will help us to be able to attract more young people to join us and to stay within the industry.

Thank you once again for your continued partnership with the MND family. The journey ahead will be an exciting one, but it will also be one where we need to be willing to take some calculated risk, push the boundaries and go into uncharted waters. This means trying new ideas which we have not tried before, where there is no SOP, where we have to be the path finders and chart the new paths ourselves. But it is when we do such things that we discover new and innovative ways of how we can do better. And the best way to do this is not to work alone, but to work together, so that we help one another to reduce the risk, to increase our awareness on what are some of the possibilities, and to bring some of these different ideas together to achieve innovative breakthroughs. 


Thank you very much.