ANN/THE STRAITS TIMES – Two Singapore Housing and Development Board (HBD) flat owners were fined for littering from their units after failing to prove their innocence recently.
The cases of a 63-year-old man and a 42-year-old woman are the first two convictions for high-rise littering under the presumption clause, said the National Environment Agency (NEA) yesterday.
The State Courts fined the man SGD700 on June 11 for throwing an object out of a toilet window from his unit in Bedok North Street 2 and the woman the same amount on June 25 for throwing items such as food waste and unknown liquid out of the kitchen window of her Ang Mo Kio Street 52 unit.
The presumption clause came into effect on July 1, 2023, to prevent registered owners and tenants of HBD flats from throwing objects from their units.
The clause – first announced in Parliament on January 9, 2023 – is applied only when it is proven in any proceedings that littering from a residential flat has been committed, according to the agency.
The presumption can be retracted only if the owner or tenant can prove that they were not in the flat at the time of the offence, or prove that the act was committed by someone else residing in the flat.
NEA’s surveillance cameras caught the two acts after they were installed due to several reports of high-rise littering.
From 2021 to 2023, NEA investigated about 29,000 high-rise littering feedback reports.
Over the same period, the agency deployed an average of 2,500 cameras each year and conducted about 1,100 enforcement actions yearly on average against those who were caught for high-rise littering.
There were about 1,500 such enforcement actions taken in 2021, around 1,100 in 2022 and about 700 in 2023.
Those found guilty of littering from a residential flat face fines of up to SGD2,000 for their first conviction, SGD4,000 for their second one, and SGD10,000 for third and subsequent convictions.
