Skip to main content

Advertisement

Advertisement

Town councils to engage residents before prosecuting them for offences: State Courts

SINGAPORE — The number of cases where residents were hauled to court under the Town Councils Act have more than doubled in the last three years, and this has led the State Courts to put out new measures to help town councils manage them.

SINGAPORE — The number of cases where residents were hauled to court under the Town Councils Act have more than doubled in the last three years, and this has led the State Courts to put out new measures to help town councils manage them.

From next month, as part of new protocols, town councils will have to negotiate and engage with the residents involved in such cases before starting criminal proceedings as a last resort. This was announced by Justice See Kee Oon, presiding judge of the State Courts, at the State Courts’ annual workplan seminar on Friday (March 9).

Town councils, which manage public housing estates in various constituencies, have taken residents to court for failing to pay their service and conservancy charges (S&CC) and for breaching by-laws, such as unlawful parking and obstruction of common property.

Such cases accounted for more than 95 per cent of all town council cases filed in the State Courts last year.

In 2015, there were 2,937 cases filed for such offences. The numbers jumped to 5,134 in 2016 and went up further to 6,839 last year.

The non-payment of S&CC formed the bulk of these numbers, with 2,494 cases filed in 2015, 4,706 in 2016, and 6,335 last year.

For unlawful parking, there were 438 cases in 2015, 428 in 2016, and 504 last year.

Except for five cases of obstruction of common property in 2015, there were none in the next two years after that.

In a statement, the State Courts said that these offences are “generally not serious regulatory offences given that they involve low moral culpability and low measure of harm to society, and are punishable with fines only”.

A vast majority, or nearly 86 per cent, of these cases prosecuted under the criminal process were resolved by composition or settlement, and the charges were then withdrawn, “by which time a considerable amount of time and public resources would have been expended”.

SERVING NOTICES

In negotiating and engaging with residents who fail to pay S&CC charges and those who breach by-laws, there will be two sets of “pre-prosecution” protocols outlining the steps for a town council to take.

For instance, it is required to issue at least two notices to a resident who does not pay S&CC, before issuing a statutory demand.

In the first notice, the defendant will be invited to agree to pay the arrears for the S&CC through an instalment plan, before being served the second notice personally by the town council.

The process will be similar for cases involving a breach of the town council by-laws, with the notices inviting the defendant to agree to pay the composition amount offered through an instalment plan.

These protocols will give town councils a “consistent system” of managing these issues, and they will help identify residents who have genuine difficulties in paying S&CC or composition amounts. The town councils can then step in to help or adapt the penalty measures to the residents’ circumstances.

Justice See said that these measures will also save public resources and offer a solution to “what is essentially a debt recovery and resettlement objective”. Right now, town councils incur legal costs when they get lawyers to file charges against residents who owe arrears for S&CC.

All the town councils engaged by the State Courts have indicated that they are agreeable to the new initiatives, Justice See added.

Town councils contacted by TODAY said that apart from going down the legal route, what they do now is to let needy residents pay off the outstanding amount in instalments, or rope them in to do simple part-time work, including looking out for areas that need to be cleaned or checking for defective items in common areas such as lightbulbs that need to be changed.

A WAY TO ‘RECOVER COSTS’

Mr Desmond Lim, who spent 14 years as a consultant at Potong Pasir Town Council under the ward’s former Member of Parliament Chiam See Tong, said that these measures are “standard practice” and help the town council to “recover costs” and tap the extra manpower.

After these measures were adopted there in 2001, there was a drop in the number of such cases, from “high” to a “handful”.

Lawyer Eugene Thuraisingam said that the new protocols will help most people who are unable to pay S&CC, and who are generally in a bad financial state due to medical costs or the loss of their jobs.

“Some form of counselling or mediation will help. Prosecution should be a last resort,” he added.

Mr Alfred Dodwell, another lawyer, said that the framework will allow the town council to work out a payment scheme for those who have financial difficulties and might eliminate “80 per cent of the cases”.

However, he questioned if getting the town councils to chase residents who default on payment or breach by-laws will, in turn, waste their resources. He noted that people do tend to put off paying such charges until “you threaten them with bankruptcy proceedings”, for instance.

Agreeing, Marine Parade Town Council chairman Lim Biow Chuan said that it takes much “time and manpower resources” to serve three reminder letters and to get property managers to visit residents’ homes to better understand the issue.

Adding that while taking residents to court is only done when there is “no choice”, ultimately, the town council still has “an obligation” to collect the charges for a common pooled fund that is used for estate maintenance.

Mr Lim said: “We can’t have people who don’t pay and (we) do nothing… Just like a management corporation, we owe it as a duty to other people who are paying”.

Read more of the latest in

Advertisement

Advertisement

Stay in the know. Anytime. Anywhere.

Subscribe to get daily news updates, insights and must reads delivered straight to your inbox.

By clicking subscribe, I agree for my personal data to be used to send me TODAY newsletters, promotional offers and for research and analysis.