SINGAPORE: Poor families should get longer financial aid from the government. That is what the director of a family service centre has suggested as a way of bridging the class divide.
It sparked an intense debate in the Channel NewsAsia documentary Regardless of Class, with host and OnePeople.sg chairman Janil Puthucheary remaining unconvinced that long-term government handouts are the solution.
Yet the question of what it would take to uplift poor families is one he “often grapples with” as a politician, he admitted. So the search for answers to the class divide continues. (Watch the documentary here.)
Methodist Welfare Services Covenant Family Service Centre (Hougang) director Cindy Ng-Tay, a social worker for decades, based her suggestion on her centre’s experience with families struggling to break out of intergenerational poverty.
It takes a long time – at least five to seven years of “consistent work” with a family – before there is a breakthrough, she said. But the short-to-medium-term assistance provided by help agencies may last only three to six months.
Mrs Cindy Ng-Tay’s team works with around 350 families at any one time.
A review by social service officers determines whether the assistance is extended or stopped. And she thinks it may be better to “channel the resources that we put into the review into a longer assistance” instead.
In this way, the poor would not have to “worry that their assistance would be cut off at a certain point”, which creates “unnecessary stress”. But Dr Puthucheary felt that the proposal could be costly.
“Wouldn’t three to six months be appropriate for some people?” he asked.
“How many? Because the experience we have is (it) isn’t enough,” replied Mrs Ng-Tay, saying that it causes the poor to “focus on the here and now” rather than thinking about long-term plans such as saving up for their children.
We want them to be able to have foresight and to start planning, the way you and I plan about our future, about our retirement.
When Dr Puthucheary suggested that the financial cost of her idea would be significant, she said: “We also have to take into account the social cost of not having this … What’s the cost of letting the divide continue?”
READ: Class – not race nor religion – is potentially Singapore’s most divisive fault line
The cost of getting it wrong, however, includes making it worse, he countered as he asked her: “You’re prepared to take that risk?” She replied: “I’d be prepared to take that risk to make things better.”
When he said it could “trap people in poverty” and cost “a lot of money we don’t have”, she replied in turn that it could “release people” and “really help us with the next generation”.
READ: Commentary: Three stories on why tackling poverty requires active listening
STUCK DESPITE INTERVENTION
While the Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, has remained stable in Singapore over the years, a segment of the population is still trapped in poverty, acknowledged Dr Puthucheary, who is also a senior minister of state.
Dr Janil Puthucheary is also Senior Minister of State for Transport and Communications and Information.
There are nearly 60,000 public rental flats, where the poorest people live, he noted. Part-time caterer Siti Sufiyah, for example, has been receiving financial assistance for years but is still living in her rental unit of 15 years.
Said Dr Puthucheary: “That’s not how it’s meant to work.”
Mdm Siti ended up in her financial situation after her first husband beat her up and their second child was diagnosed as a high-risk asthma patient. At that point, she was unable to work.
“Which employer would want to employ somebody who always takes leave? Because my son would be admitted (to hospital). In a week, three days he’d be in hospital,” she recalled.
Mdm Siti Sufiyah.
Her second marriage gave her two more children, but her then husband cheated on her and did not provide financial support for the children.
Asked how difficult it has been to renew her financial assistance – which can be tied to the recipient finding work – the divorcee said: “If I want to go out to work, I need somebody to tend to my children.”
Her two elder boys are now in the Normal (Technical) stream, which saddens her “a bit”, as she expected her children to make it the Normal (Academic) stream like she did.
Access to resources and the ability to use resources – constrained by years of chronic stress caused by poverty – are two of the reasons families are stuck despite intervention, said Mrs Ng-Tay.
Besides her idea of longer financial aid, she identified early education and support for children from low-income families as crucial.
“Don’t tie the access of resources for children to their parents’ marital status, or socio-economic status, or even work status,” she suggested.
She agreed with Dr Puthucheary on the importance of balancing parental and social responsibility, but added: “We need to look at the vulnerability of the children.
If we want them to get a good start in life, then it would be quite unfair for the children’s life outcomes to be dependent on whether their parents would be motivated or not.
The right balance, she felt, was to “recognise structural factors that maintain poverty” and to also understand that the poor “have the potential to be inspired” to live better lives.
CAN BUSINESSES MAKE A DIFFERENCE?
One person turning her life around is barista Evalene Foo. People once thought she was good for nothing because she had dropped out of school in Secondary Three, ran away from home and got into trouble with the law.
Ms Evalene Foo.
“I mixed with bad friends, so I lost interest in my studies. That’s why I dropped out,” explained the 21-year-old.
But then she went for emotional training, which taught her to overcome her anger, be happier and not let other people affect her. She now dreams of managing her own cafe, maybe in 10 years’ time.
Her newfound ambition, after a month on the job, “shocked” her mother, she admitted. “Because in the past, I wasn’t that good. I had no confidence in myself.”
Ms Foo works at Bettr Barista, founded in 2011 by Ms Pamela Chng to provide marginalised women with an employable skill.
“A lot of them come from broken families or just families who don’t have the resources and time to invest in their livelihood and their education. You see them falling back further and further in school,” said Ms Chng.
“By the time they hit 15 or 16, they’re just too far behind. And a lot of them, through a fear of failure, give up.”
She sees this happening “a lot, especially through our conversations with the schools”. While there is little she can do about the home environment, she thinks businesses “can do a lot to, say, rethink how we’re working”.
But are efforts like hers too thin on the ground to make a difference? “The approach that we’re taking here is really looking at the depth of the impact and the longevity of the impact,” said Ms Chng.
“If we can change one person’s life, and they go around and change their children’s lives, their family’s lives and then their community’s lives, then you can start to amplify the impact.”
Ms Pamela Chng’s vision for her business’ future is based on creating a culture and mindset of helping people to ‘move up the value chain’ in empathetic way, yet not compromising standards and quality.
She agreed with Dr Puthucheary that it would not be easy to incentivise businesses to get on board, but she added: “The incentive is the future. What future do you want to create for yourself?”
INTEGRATED PUBLIC HOUSING
One plan of action for encouraging social mixing that will soon come to fruition is the construction of the first three integrated Build-To-Order blocks, comprising rental and sold flats, in Woodlands, Bukit Batok and Sengkang.
READ: Housing and urban plans must be inclusive and resilient: Lawrence Wong
But even this may not be a good idea, according to Institute of Policy Studies senior research fellow Leong Chan Hoong, who questioned how some of the potential frictions on the ground could be mitigated or addressed.
Dr Leong Chan Hoong.
“There’ll be tensions because the needs, priorities and values are different,” he said. “That’ll be the challenge … Contact alone may not necessarily produce the desired outcome. It’s important to ensure that the conditions of the contact are acceptable to everybody.
“In other words, you have to ensure that interaction is genuine, intimate and, most importantly, there’s no status difference in the interaction. Nobody feels intimidated (or) that they’re being slighted because they’re engaging with someone of a different level.”
READ: Commentary: Direct interventions, not just social mixing, needed to narrow housing inequality
It is only human, acknowledged Dr Puthucheary, “to seek out people who are like us, to find our tribe”. But if classism – prejudice against people from a different social class – prevails, then shared spaces would not work, he noted.
And if that is case, class divisions in Singapore can only be a mounting worry.
Watch the documentary Regardless of Class here. Read more about the survey findings on how class – not race nor religion – is potentially Singapore’s most divisive fault line.
