Passed on 26 October 1966 and brought into force in June 1967, the Land Acquisition Act gave the newly independent state sweeping powers to compulsorily acquire private land for any public purpose, for housing, or for any commercial or industrial use the government deemed beneficial. Compensation was set by statutory formula at rates well below open-market value and the government's decision to acquire was effectively insulated from challenge in the courts. Successive amendments and gazette notifications allowed the state to assemble land rapidly for the Housing and Development Board, the Jurong Town Corporation and later the Urban Redevelopment Authority. State landholding rose from under half of the island at independence to roughly 90 per cent by the 1980s, alongside a large programme of kampong clearance and resettlement.
The Act is the hidden foundation of the Singapore model: without cheap, fast and uncontestable land assembly, neither the HDB new towns nor Jurong industrial estate nor the mass rapid transit network could have been delivered at the speed they were. It became the most cited example in Asia of a developmental state using compulsory acquisition plus land-value capture to finance urbanisation, and is widely studied as a counter-model to market-led land assembly.
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