Making Singapore an Elderly/Disabled-Friendly Country

About seven or eight years ago, there was an interview in the Straits Times in which the then chief of the Land Transport Authority (LTA) touched on the high cost of providing MRT stations with barrier-free access to the elderly and the disabled. His comments caused a public furore with a flurry of letters filling the ST Forum page for weeks, including those from Prof. Tommy Koh, disabled societies and myself. I am not sure if our voices have had any influence on LTA’s policy and attitude towards providing barrier-free access, but am nevertheless glad to see that today, most MRT stations have installed lifts and are more friendly to the elderly and the disabled. With the implementation of the Building & Construction Authority’s (BCA) Code on Barrier-Free Accessibility, and with public buses being fitted with disabled access platform, we can look forward to Singapore becoming an elderly/disabled-friendly country.

Unfortunately, despite these improvements in public facilities for the elderly and the disabled, there is a hitch – some of our physically challenged citizens living in older HDB estates may have problem leaving their own home because the lifts do not land on every floor and there are no ramps around the blocks. In a Straits Times front-page article dated 13 April 2006, the plight of these physically challenged citizens were well highlighted.

The cause of this appears to be politics – lift-upgrading programme is complementary to the Main Upgrading Programme (MUP), which is in turn an election strategy of the People’s Action Party. In the 17 June 2006 ST Forum letter, Minister for National Development Mah Bow Tan explained that ‘the upgrading of our older public-housing estates is over and above these basic obligations of the Government’, hence this will remain part of the People’s Action Party’s (PAP) general election strategy. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong had also reiterated the same argument during his visit to Australia.

Sure, if a candidate had a proposal to improve the overall environment of the constituency he is contesting in, or a plan to improve economic viability of neighbourhood businesses, by all means he can call this his own and his strategy. I believe most Singaporeans do not dispute the fact that MUP involving changes to building’s facade, environment, interior, covered walk-ways and barbeque pits, etc. are beyond the Government’s obligations. And yes, it is fair that the PAP Government give priority to upgrade constituencies that had voted for the PAP.

However, does the PAP Government agree that all Singaporean citizens, including the elderly and the disabled, have equal rights? If we recognise our physically-challenged citizens as equals, then shouldn’t it be their basic right to have access to their own home and to public facilities? Is it then an essential, and not a luxury, to provide barrier-free access regardless of which political party a constituency belongs to? Shouldn’t the lift-upgrading programme be mandatory, rather than complementary to the MUP?

The Government has pledged that it will provide lift-upgrading for all eligible blocks, regardless of whether they are PAP or non-PAP wards. However, the target to do so by 2015 seemed suspiciously long, given that the HDB had initiated a study on barrier-free design features as far back as mid-70s (“Towards a barrier-free environment in public housing” - BCA Seminar 21 July 2002), and the BCA Code on Barrier-Free Accessibility has been implemented since 1990, with subsequent revisions in 1995 and 2000. In the 13 April article, ST quoted a former HDB chief architect saying that while older flats were built without lift landing on every floor due to different priorities then, the designers had an eye on the future…the blocks were built with a lift shaft which could by knocking out the wall at each level, allow the lift to stop at every floor’. So why does it take so long to upgrade the lifts now?

Let’s not let politics get in the way of our goal of providing barrier-free access in Singapore. Spare a thought for our elderly and the disabled, they are after all, our fellow Singaporean citizens too.