Speech by Minister Chee Hong Tat at the HDB Community Day 2025
Jul 26, 2025
Mdm Halimah Yacob
Fellow Grassroots Advisers, Mr Jeffrey Siow and Dr Choo Pei Ling
Colleagues, residents
Ladies and gentlemen
Good morning, everyone. I’m very happy to join you at this year’s HDB Community Day.
The theme for this year’s Community Day is “Celebrating LIFE in the Heartlands”. It is therefore fitting that we are holding this very nice event here in Tengah – our newest town, where residents are starting to build their homes and a vibrant community together.
Progress of Tengah Town Development
Tengah is our first new town in over two decades. To date, we have completed close to 12,000 HDB units in Tengah. By the end of this year, almost half of the planned 30,000 flats in Tengah will be completed.
The planning of Tengah reflects our vision for the future of public housing – to provide not just roofs over our heads, but also liveable spaces where communities can thrive.
The planning of Tengah had focused on the seamless integration of green spaces throughout the town, bringing residents closer to nature and to one another.
Right across from us is one such green space - the Plantation Farmway, which connects residents to key amenities within the town.
Along the Farmway, neighbours can meet and interact at communal spaces such as playgrounds, allotment gardens, and fitness stations.
At Park District, residents can also look forward to their own ‘Central Park’ – a lush green oasis right at your doorstep.
For residents of the Garden District, Garden Farmway is being progressively completed to bring similar green and communal spaces closer to home.
The planning of Tengah provided opportunities for residents to share your ideas and your aspirations for this town even before you started to move in.
Since 2019, over 6,500 Tengah homebuyers from 22 precincts have provided your valuable feedback via HDB’s Tengah Sensing surveys. HDB and our partner agencies also engaged more than 13,000 Tengah households at various touchpoints since July 2023, including during MyNiceHome Roadshows and key collection appointments.
Through these engagements, residents provided valuable insights and helped to shape our plans for Tengah town. This is a joint effort which we have done in collaboration with our residents. For example, the sheltered linkways and cycling paths that we planned for Tengah were well-received by many Tengah residents, who emphasised the importance of connectivity infrastructure. These features are integrated into the design of Tengah’s transport routes, so residents can walk and cycle safely throughout the town.
We will continue to work together with our Grassroots Advisers and community leaders to listen to your views and feedback as we build up the town. We will learn from the positive experience and this is also the approach we will take for other new estates in future, as we will also be building new towns and estates in other parts of Singapore.
Dear residents, we have heard your feedback on providing more convenient access to amenities. Several key facilities have been developed, and we will bring in more schools, places of worship and also healthcare facilities.
Families with young children can look forward to seven preschools across the Plantation and Garden districts that are already open.
To bring the wider Tengah community together, the newly-opened Tengah Community Club offers a range of workshops and events for residents of all ages.
As you know, your Grassroots Adviser, Mr Jeffrey Siow, is the Minister for Transport. We will ensure that we enhance transport connectivity so that residents can travel more easily within the town and to other parts of Singapore.
Currently, three bus services operate from Tengah Bus Interchange, connecting residents to nearby towns such as Jurong East, Bukit Batok and Bukit Gombak.
By the end of 2026, a total of eight new bus services will be introduced in Tengah and Brickland, of which two will commence operations by end-2025. One of these is service 872, which will connect residents to the East-West Line at Chinese Garden MRT station from August this year.
With the official opening of Plantation Plaza, residents will have better access to food options and daily necessities. 69 out of the 75 HDB shops are currently open. The remaining six shops are expected to be operational by this quarter.
Looking ahead, Tengah’s second neighbourhood centre – Parc Point, located in the heart of Park District, will begin its operations from the first quarter of next year.
Parc Point will be a vibrant hub, with a new polyclinic and over 40 shops offering a wide range of dining and retail options, all within convenient reach of Tengah Bus Interchange.
Celebrating the Community Spirit with HDB's Friends of Our Heartlands (FOH) Network and Tengah FOH Volunteers
It is important to have good infrastructure in place, but we know that a town is much more than its buildings and hardware alone. It is the residents and the people who are living here, who use the facilities and call this home, who bring Tengah to life.
The pioneer batch of residents started moving in from August 2023, and many have stepped forward to warmly welcome their new neighbours into this new town.
One of them is Mr. Madhavan Ramakrishnan, a volunteer team leader, who has become a familiar and welcoming face in the neighbourhood.
You may also know Mr Aaron Lim and Ms Lana Lum, who are Tengah’s resident Garden Leaders, and who have been initiating gardening workshops to share their knowledge with fellow residents. We met them earlier and they were sharing with us that they picked up gardening recently.
Together, they are part of a pool of 50 active volunteers in Tengah, who belong to HDB’s wider Friends of Our Heartlands or FOH network.
This year, we are honored to welcome Mdm. Halimah Yacob, the Chancellor of the Singapore University of Social Sciences and also our former President of the Republic of Singapore, as the network’s first patron. We know Mdm Halimah is a very strong advocate for ground-up initiatives and a champion for volunteerism, so we are very honoured to have Mdm. Halimah as the first patron of FOH. I am confident she will work closely with our volunteers and staff to inspire more community leaders and volunteers not just in Tengah but also across different towns and neighbourhoods in Singapore.
Singapore’s Friendly Neighbourhood Award (SFNA)
Apart from volunteering, residents can also contribute to their neighbourhood through daily acts of kindness and looking out for one another.
Today, we are also celebrating these generous and kind-hearted residents, through the Singapore’s Friendly Neighbourhood Award.
The Award received over 230 nominations, which shows there are many good neighbours amongst us who serve as inspiring role models.
For example, as you saw earlier, in Lengkok Bahru, volunteers run a food aid programme to supply essential food items to about 60 families in need.
In my constituency Bishan-Toa Payoh, we have 40 volunteers from Bishan East Zone 1 who created a green hub with a garden, a recycling station, a communal fridge and a library for the community.
Over at West Terra in Bukit Batok, residents teach one another basic lifesaving skills and how to respond to emergencies, such as fires, blackouts and scams.
These are just some of the many good examples that we have seen across different parts of Singapore. It takes a willing heart and an even stronger spirit of giving back to dedicate time and effort to the community. Our award recipients, and our volunteers working quietly behind the scenes, truly embody the spirit of gotong royong by coming together to extend mutual help and support for their neighbours.
It is their unwavering dedication and selfless belief that make our neighbourhoods better places to live in, and also more caring communities that all of us are proud to call home.
Conclusion
Let me conclude my speech by thanking all our volunteers, partners and colleagues who have been working tirelessly to foster community spirit in our heartlands. This is an effort that takes many years to build up, but is worthwhile and satisfying when you have gone through the journey. Your efforts have not only helped your neighbors, but also helped to build a more caring and inclusive community.
As PM said, we are not done building Singapore, both in terms of hardware and heartware. With your support, we will continue the hard work to build endearing homes for all Singaporeans, generation after generation. Thank you.