§5.1Five Things We Will Never Do

• OPT-IN ONLY · COMMITMENTS, NOT ASPIRATIONS

Singapore's hawkers have already lived through quality control designed by someone else – operators who applied loss-making value meals and set data-sharing and app-discount terms that many stallholders resented, as reported (the value meal was NEA's tender condition: MSE, 24 Sep 2025). So we think any credible taste standard has to begin with commitments, written into the constitution, about what it will never contain:

• No cameras. Documentation filming happens by appointment, for the archive, with the master directing what is captured.
• No mandatory data feeds. Revenue verification exists in exactly one place – a hawker voluntarily entering a Succession Mortgage – and uses the hawker's own records.
• No public scoreboards or league tables, of any kind, anywhere in the system.
• No decertification tribunals. Certification is celebratory and renewable; the only financial linkage in the whole plan is positive – the Heritage Excellence rebate, a cash rebate sized to the stall's rent and paid to the hawker, never off the rent, for stalls that opt in and sustain the standard.
• No twenty-dimension scorecards. Scores that look exact freeze a living cuisine at a starting point nobody chose, and hand cooks a compliance checklist instead of a craft. A dish is not twenty numbers.