Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, if he will make a comparative assessment of the level of proposed weekend pay under the new junior doctors' contract with weekend pay for (a) prison officers, (b) fire fighters, (c) police officers, (d) call centre workers, (e) consultants and (f) nurses, midwives and physios.

Junior doctors already work weekends, and they will continue to be fairly rewarded for work undertaken at the weekend using the weekend allowance proposed by the British Medical Association negotiators. Comparative rates are set out in the attached table.

Because of the allowance based approach to weekend working, the effective hourly rate juniors are paid will vary depending on how many hours they work over how many weekends. In almost all cases junior doctors will receive weekend pay better than other National Health Service professional staff.

A typical rota for a junior doctor involves an average of 6.5 hours a week being worked at weekends. (i.e. they work two long shifts of 13 hours every four weekends). This is split evenly over Saturdays and Sundays and includes night work.

For working those weekend hours the percentage hourly supplement across all the hours worked for different groups of NHS staff would be

- 66% for a junior doctor (37% for night work plus an additional 7.5% weekend allowance set as a percentage of basic pay)

- 56% for a band 3 Health Care Assistant (37% for Saturday, 74% for Sunday)

- 45% for a nurse (30% for Saturday, 60% for Sunday)

- 33% for a consultant