Proposals · Hawkers and Social Protection

Attach support to the person, not the stall (the incidence rule)

Where a market sets the rent, support goes to the hawker, never to the stall's rent, because landlords recapture stall-attached support at renewal.

A rent subsidy or stall grant raises what a stall can bear, and the rent rises to absorb it at the next renewal; HDB's January 2026 pass-through undertaking and clawback reflect the same logic. Stall-attached tools therefore work only where the state is the landlord, while person-attached tools such as a CPF match, injury cover or a Fellowship follow the hawker. Follow the Plate estimates that $200 a month of permanent stall-attached support across 14,400 stalls would cost $34.6M a year, with $12.8M recaptured by landlords at renewal; paid to the person, it reaches hawkers in full.

Who pays

The library gives this mechanism no who-pays tag of its own.

What it builds on

July 2026 rent support of $200 a month per stall for six months, stall-attached and limited to markets and hawker centres (§2.11.1, Hawkers and Social Protection, C.7).

Who gains

Hawkers: Person-attached support follows the hawker wherever they cook, and no landlord can capture it (Hawkers and Social Protection, C.7).
Government: Stays clear of the rent-control fight ministers have declined twice (Hawkers and Social Protection, C.7).

Model scores

Scored by the Follow the Plate model. How the scores work is in Follow the Plate, D.7. Cash and savings are shown separately. “Per programme dollar” is the household gain for each dollar the programme spends.

$200/month, stall-attached (Hawkers and Social Protection, C.7): $200/month attached to the stall, made permanent; landlord recaptures theta at renewal
Amounts a year	Per tendered NEA stall (NEA centre, tendered)	National, at 100% take-up (14,200 stalls)
Programme cost	$2,400	$34,080,000
Net public cost	$2,239	$30,030,087
Hawker household: cash	$2,000	$18,808,646
Hawker household: savings and other gains	$239	$957,840
Diners	$0	$0
Per programme dollar: all gains	$0.93	$0.58
Per programme dollar: cash	$0.83	$0.55

$200/month, person-attached (Hawkers and Social Protection, C.7): The same $200/month paid to the person (retirement match)
Amounts a year	Per tendered NEA stall (NEA centre, tendered)	National, at 100% take-up (14,200 stalls)
Programme cost	$2,400	$34,080,000
Net public cost	$2,400	$34,080,000
Hawker household: cash	$0	$0
Hawker household: savings and other gains	$2,400	$34,080,000
Diners	$0	$0
Per programme dollar: all gains	$1.00	$1.00
Per programme dollar: cash	$0.00	$0.00

Where the library discusses it

Hawkers and Social Protection, C.7 · §2.4 · Follow the Plate, D.1 · Follow the Plate, D.7.2 · Method, Levers and Data, F.2.3

Note: A design rule rather than a costed programme. Capture rates by landlord type are assumptions (Method, Levers and Data, F.2).