MS Explains: Why MPs are proposing S$100 cuts to ministries' billion-dollar budgets - Mothership.SG - News from Singapore, Asia and around the world

This is an updated version of this article, first published in 2022.

The Committee of Supply (COS) debates are in full swing since they started on Feb. 24, after Parliament voted in favour of Budget 2023.

First cut is (not) the deepest

This year, the first Member of Parliament (MP) to speak during the COS debates was the Nominated Member of Parliament (NMP) Koh Lian Pin.

“Chairman, I beg to move that the total sum to be allocated for Head U of the Estimates be reduced by S$100,” he said, before going on to ask about the significance of the United Nations’ COP 27 summit on climate change in Egypt last year, as well as the Singaporean delegation’s contributions and expectations for the upcoming COP 28.

“The Estimates” refers to the estimated expenditure of various government ministries and entities in the 2023 Supply Bill.

In the Supply Bill, “Head U” is the estimated expenditure for the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO)— a sum of S$1,510,432,800.

Different government bodies are referred to differently, with “Head T” referring to the the Ministry of National Development, or “Head C” to the Auditor-General’s Office.

Koh was proposing that PMO’s budget for the upcoming financial year be reduced from S$1,510,432,800 to S$1,510,432,700 instead.

He wasn’t the only one to do this.

You might have heard many other MPs similarly asking for a specific reduction of S$100 from various other ministries’ estimated expenditure.

Why do MPs ask for S$100 budget cuts?

The short answer: Convention.

According to the Budget and Parliament websites, MPs have the opportunity to ask for a symbolic S$100 “cut” to a ministry’s estimates during the COS debate, in order to raise areas of concern over that specific ministry’s policies.

As Tan Chuan-Jin, the current Speaker of Parliament, wrote in 2019:

In other words, the MPs are not actually asking for the budgets to be reduced — they are simply using the suggested budget cut to signal their intention to speak.

This is why, when Koh was later asked if he would like to withdraw his amendment (i.e. to leave PMO’s estimated expenditure unchanged), he did so, by asking for “leave” (or, permission), which was duly granted by the majority of MPs — a process that was also followed by other MPs who had proposed “cuts” to various ministries’ budgets.

But where did this very specific set of procedures come from? Here’s what we found out from trawling through Parliamentary history.

Why S$100, and not S$1,000 or S$10?

With ministries’ budgets regularly surpassing the billion- or even 10-billion dollar mark, wouldn’t a S$1,000 cut still be a “token amount”?

A quick look through the records of past Budget proceedings shows that smaller token cuts of S$10 have been proposed, even before Singapore’s independence.

S$10 cuts were also common even several decades later, in the 2000s.

Non-token cuts were also suggested in the pre-independence Legislative Assembly (the precursor to today’s Parliament), with one early example being a cut of S$85,000 suggested by MP for Bukit Panjang Goh Tong Liang, in 1955.

Goh had done so in order to voice his opposition to public funds (specifically, the sum of S$85,000) being allocated to the Singapore Family Planning Association (FPA), which gave advice to families on spacing out or limiting the number of their children, and provided facilities for contraception.

Suggesting that the S$85,000 budget be cut by S$85,000 was, in effect, a proposal that the entire item be struck off the list of things that the government would fund in the upcoming year.

A spirited debate ensued, culminating in a vote where the majority of MPs voted against Goh’s suggestion, allowing the FPA budget to stand untouched.

Practice of suggesting token “cuts”

The practice of suggesting token cuts appears to have become the standard practice since Singapore’s independence.

From 1965 onwards, only token cuts of either S$10 or S$100 were proposed — although strong opposition to fiscal policies was still heard from time to time.

The amount for a token cut appears to have been standardised as S$100, from sometime in the 2000s.

Indeed, the current Standing Orders of the Parliament of Singapore says that MPs can propose a reduction of “a token amount of S$100” for any head of expenditure.

Paragraph (4) of Standing Order No. 92 reads:

Thus, it appears that the practice of suggesting cuts to a particular set of expenditures is something that helps to keep debates organised, and focused.