Debated in Parliament on 10 Sep 2012.
Dr Intan Azura Mokhtar asked the Minister for Transport with the claw-back on past oversupply of Certificates of Entitlement (COEs) and increasing COE prices, how has the number of private vehicles on the road been affected in the last five-year period.
Between end-2006 and end-2011, our total vehicle population grew from 778,257 to 932,007, an increase of 153,750.
With these figures, it is easier to put into perspective the various changes we have made to our COE system in the past few years, including the claw-back of COEs.
Between 1999 and 2010, the quotas of COEs were determined by projecting vehicle de-registrations for the year ahead using past de-registration trends. If there was any over- or under-projection of the actual number of vehicles deregistered, the quotas for subsequent periods were adjusted to correct for this. In 2010, we changed to the current methodology of recycling COEs using actual vehicle de-registrations, which removed the need to do subsequent adjustments. However, 17,558 over-projected COEs in Quota Years 2008 and 2009, representing less than 2% of our vehicle population, still had to be clawed back.
As we had also brought down the annual allowable vehicle population growth rate from 3% to 1.5% starting from 2009, we decided to have this claw-back paced out over a few years. Between April 2010 and July 2012, 12,769 COEs, or about 73% of the 2008-09 over-projection, were recovered from COE quotas. The claw-back of the remaining 4,789 COEs was deferred for one year, till next August. Overall, the claw-back has been relatively modest, affecting the total vehicle population by about 1.4% in all so far.
Since we implemented these COE changes and adjustments from 2009, the vehicle growth rate has been brought down to 2.2% in 2010 and 1.1% in 2011, closer to the 1.5% annual allowable growth rate.
PAPERCUTS