Flexibility to Spend Community Development Council Vouchers at Small Businesses

Mr Leong Mun Wai asked the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance why is flexibility not being given to Singaporeans to spend the $150 Community Development Council vouchers for supermarkets at small businesses that may benefit more from the increased expenditure by households than the large supermarket chains.

Since December 2021, the Government has disbursed three tranches of the digital CDC Vouchers to help Singaporean households with their daily expenses. The first two tranches of $100 each were restricted to participating heartland merchants and hawkers, precisely to support heartland businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since then, however, there have been many requests from Singaporeans for their CDC Vouchers to be used at supermarkets. Hence we split the coverage of the third tranche of vouchers in January 2023 equally between supermarkets and heartland businesses, to better meet the needs of Singaporean families.

The third tranche of CDC Vouchers are valid till the end of the year, but the data to date indicates that utilisation of the supermarket vouchers is higher than the vouchers for heartland businesses. In fact, there have also been requests from members of the public to allow flexibility for their unused vouchers for heartland businesses to be extended to supermarkets.

For now, we will continue to maintain the parameters of the scheme. We will review from this experience what we might do for the fourth tranche of CDC Vouchers due in January next year.