SINGAPORE — The Government has “slightly shifted” its focus to extend assistance “to middle and beyond middle income groups” in the Budget this year, said Acting Minister for Social and Family Development Chan Chun Sing yesterday.

Mr Chan, who was speaking on the sidelines of the recording of the Budget forum in Mandarin, said: “In the past, we focused a lot of attention on the lowest-income group, which is the bottom 10 and 20 percentile. In this Budget, within our means ... we have extended the help to the middle and beyond middle income groups.”

Pointing to the Wage Credit Scheme as an example, he said: “We literally took the whole surplus from the previous year and passed it on to the workers. And when we set the qualifying criteria at S$4,000 per worker … it has gone past the median worker’s salary, which means that more than 50 per cent of our workers will benefit from this scheme.”

Mr Chan said that the Government will be tackling Singapore’s widening income inequality, with measures that consist of “transfers and subsidies to help the lower- to middle-income families tide over the challenges that they are facing every day”.

He added: “In the longer-term measures, we really have to invest much more in the education of children and the training of adults so that they can, on their own, earn a higher salary to overcome the challenges of the future.”

While some analysts have called this year’s Budget a “Robin Hood Budget”, Mr Chan said that “every Budget, in some sense, is taking from those who are more able to help those who are less able”.

When it was pointed out to him that the support given to the poor might not be equal in quantum to what would be taxed from the rich, Mr Chan said: “We must also accept that different groups of people have different needs.”

He added: “What we most urgently need to do is to identify the specific needs of the groups of people. Some of them may need more financial help, some of them may need help in the form of emotional support or social service support.

“This is where we have to, perhaps, do a triage in how we allocate our resources accordingly. Only then, can we make most effective use of the finite resources that we have.”