THE PLANOn One Page

Three moves, three proving grounds, and an endowment the whole country can put its name on.

1. 1
   Make the trade worth enteringPublished rent bands, with stalls let by ballot, as Build-To-Order (BTO) flats are. Price freedom for the cook; Makan Vouchers, through the existing system of CDC vouchers (Government vouchers for every household), for every household that needs help with the bill. A Relief-Hawker Corps to break the six-day grind, and Buying Circles, run by the hawkers at each centre, to bargain together for ingredients, power and delivery. Insurance for the oldest stallholders comes first, before anything is asked in return.
2. 2
   Move the knowledge before it is lostA Regulars' List, open at every government hawker centre, records the dishes each centre's regulars want kept; a separate yearly count, which never names a stall, tells Parliament how many are at risk. A Culinary Seed Bank documents endangered dishes well enough for a trained cook to cook from, pays masters to teach as Fellows at their own stalls, proves each record on the master's day off, and sets every graduate up in a real stall with financed equipment and an income top-up for 24 months – because Singapore has already shown it can train hawkers and lose them.
3. 3
   Let the business pay for successionA busy stall has real goodwill (what a stall's name, recipes and regulars are worth when it changes hands). The Succession Mortgage lets the incoming cook pay the retiring one out of future takings, through an escrow (a neutral account that collects the payments and pays them out) with a guarantee behind it; the Family Name Royalty gives the master's children a ten-year stake in the name above the stall. Gifts are kept for the dishes the market cannot carry.

• 4-year programme$19.68M
• endowment target$40M
• Master Fellows44
• apprenticeships88
• funded first stalls26
• pilot centres3
• cameras0

Who pays. The endowment and its partners fund the Seed Bank, the Security Package, the Corps and the Fellowships. Succession largely pays for itself through the mortgage. Government is asked for a few decisions that cost little – a rent-band pilot, a change to the succession scheme that costs nothing, a faster relief route for sick hawkers and an hour-a-day deputy, both on the Joint Operator Scheme, and cleaning contracts re-tendered at the pilot centres – and for Budget money it can see line by line in §7.7: a first gift and matching pool (public money that matches gifts dollar for dollar) for the endowment, a small operating match (the Government's yearly grant towards running costs), Makan Vouchers through a system it already runs, a table-cleaning fee subsidy at the pilot centres, and the tax given up on gifts. A retirement match for stallholders under 55 is costed there for later, next to the longer list of things this plan does not ask for: no new statute, no new agency, no surveillance powers, no rent control on private coffeeshops, and no compulsion of any hawker, ever.