Unintended Release of Information Regarding Three-year Lock-in Period for New Vehicles Bought for Private-hire Purposes

Ms Hazel Poa asked the Minister for Transport (a) what are the circumstances that led to the unintended release of the information on the new mandatory three-year lock-in period for vehicles registered as business-owned private-hire cars, (b) whether an investigation will be conducted into this incident, and (c) whether any steps will be taken to prevent its recurrence.

Mr Speaker, the Land Transport Authority (LTA) had earlier explained why it brought forward the implementation of a mandatory three-year lock-in period for all newly registered or converted business-owned chauffeured private hire cars (PHCs) in its news release on 19 February 2025. Let me recap the key points.

LTA had originally planned to announce this policy change during the Ministry of Transport's (MOT’s) Committee of Supply (COS) debate in March 2025, as part of an update on our review of the point-to-point transport sector. However, LTA had to bring forward the implementation date due to an unintentional error by its system vendor NCS.

The team from NCS, who was working on the IT system changes, made a deployment error, resulting in the message regarding the lock-in period being prematurely revealed to some users before the planned announcement date. The mistake was due to human error. NCS has taken steps to prevent a recurrence.

When MOT and LTA found out on 18 February that the information was prematurely revealed to some users, we decided to make a public announcement on the policy change on 19 February morning. This was because there was an ongoing Certificate of Entitlement (COE) bidding exercise from 17 February to 19 February, and we wanted to ensure fairness and transparency to all parties and allow bidders sufficient time to decide whether to adjust their bids, before the bidding cycle closed at 4.00 pm on 19 February.

Mr Speaker, three other Members, namely Ms Mariam Jaafar, Mr Dennis Tan and Mr Yip Hon Weng, have filed questions on the lock-in period for business-owned chauffeured PHCs for subsequent Sittings. MOT will be sharing more details regarding the review of the point-to-point transport sector at the upcoming COS debate and we will address their questions then.

I think the Senior Minister of State for her reply. Is the Senior Minister of State able to share what steps NCS has taken to prevent a recurrence? And has there been any impact on the execution of this policy due to the implementation being earlier than planned?

I thank the Member for the supplementary question. As I noted earlier in my reply, this was a deployment error. NCS had acknowledged and taken responsibility for the error. The deployment error occurred when the system changes were being deployed to the production environment, that is the actual system. The lines of code for program to control when this lock-in period message will be displayed and to which users, were actually not deployed. So, it resulted in the premature display of this lock-in period message to users who were using the digital service for the relevant vehicle transactions.

When this error was discovered, NCS has taken various steps to prevent the recurrence of this error. Firstly, they have implemented additional checks both before and after the code merging deployment. They have also put in place a buddy system with a senior developer to check on the works or to review the works that were done.