The Record

Companion volume A. If you want to know what has been tried, start here. It reads on its own and says which other documents to read with it.

This volume at a glance

Read this if you…

• want to know what has been tried since 2012, by whom, and what it taught;
• run a charity, a grassroots group, a hawkers' association or a company programme that already helps hawkers, and want to know where the plan would work with you;
• want to know what Parliament has said, what the Government has objected to, and how the plan answers;
• want to know which of the plan's ideas are new, and which were proposed or tried before.

The bottom line

1. Government's schemes come first. Training, incubation, stall hand-over, grants, vouchers and tender reform: each works, and each stops short of the cook's income and the hand-over itself (A.1.1).
2. Beyond Government, the help is real, generous and thin. Hawkers' own bodies speak for the trade; the Mayors' CDC Vouchers carry money to the stall; charities pay hawkers for the meals their beneficiaries redeem. Much of the rest came and went with the pandemic (A.1.2).
3. The record is ten years of well-aimed schemes that lack what makes them work. Training without the recipe, a succession scheme that pays nothing for the stall's name and regulars, centres run by operators the trade came to distrust (A.2).
4. Parliament has asked for much of this already. Members on both sides of the House have proposed a ballot, quality in the tender, cheaper food paid for by the State and an academy; the Government's objections are fair ones, and each has an answer (A.3, A.4).
5. The hand-over itself has no scheme. No scheme pays a retiring hawker for his goodwill, pays a master to teach, keeps his recipes in an archive good enough to cook from, or counts the dishes at risk, which UNESCO's form asks for (A.5, A.7).

Granted, the search was wide, not exhaustive. "Found no scheme" is the honest claim, and I would rather be told what I missed.

How this connects

Where it comes from. The Plan's §1.2 and §1.3 in full, with the parts of §1.1, §2.2, §3.6, §3.8, §4.2 and §5.5 that set out what was said and done before this plan. The Plan keeps the findings, the map of who helps today (Fig. ES.1) and a card for each proposal; this volume is the record behind them.

Read with. The Executive Summary, for the whole plan in eight pages; the Plan, for each proposal named here; the Budget Book (B.7), for what the plan asks of Government and what it does not.

In this volume. A.1 Who helps today · A.2 The record since 2012 · A.3 What Parliament said, sitting by sitting · A.4 The objections, answered · A.5 The UNESCO record · A.6 NHB, fairly · A.7 What only this plan does, and what it borrows.

Terms used

• FMAS. The federation that has spoken for the hawker trade since 1989, with an association at each of more than 110 hawker centres.
• CDC vouchers. Government vouchers given to every household in rounds, half spendable at hawkers and heartland merchants.
• HDP. NEA and SkillsFuture's 2020 training programme for aspiring hawkers, now under review.
• HSS. NEA's 2022 scheme letting a retiring veteran assign his stall, recipes and skills to a non-family successor.
• Operator-run centre. A hawker centre run for NEA by a socially-conscious enterprise operator: 16 of the 123 today.
• Regulars' List. The plan's list, at every government centre, of the dishes its regulars want kept, graded Bronze to Platinum by their endorsements, kept apart from the yearly count of stalls at risk, which never names one (the Plan, §3.6).