The BP Retailing Pension & Life Assurance Scheme and the BPFM Pension Scheme are defined contribution (money purchase) sections of the BP Pension Fund.
In these sections:
Your own contributions, together with the company’s contributions, build up in your own retirement account.
The income you get when you retire will depend on:
- How much you’ve built up in your account through these contributions
- Any investment returns on the contributions
- The cost of buying a pension income (annuity) from an insurance company.
The BP Retailing Pension Scheme is currently open to logistics staff and the BPFM Pension Scheme is closed to new joiners.
Investing contributions
The trustee makes a range of investment funds available to members according to its statement of investment principles. The trustee’s Responsible Investment policy (RI) policy sets out the trustee’s RI beliefs and how RI is implemented across the Fund’s asset classes, and through engagement, manager selection and monitoring, and reporting.
Legal & General Investment Management invests the contributions in investment funds that aim to track the performance of a specific benchmark or index.
The investment funds have transaction costs and charges.
You can find out more about the investment funds in the investment factsheet library.
You can find the trustee chairman’s comments on costs and charges in the chairman’s statement
on defined contribution scheme governance.
Joining the retailing scheme
The member's guide
explains the contributions and the benefits you will get.
To join before you are automatically enrolled after you join BP, or to re-join after opting out, complete the
joining form
and send it to BP UK pensions and benefits at Sunbury.
Choosing your investments
Your basic options are:
- Self-select – you choose your own mix of funds from 13 different investment funds,
regularly review their performance and make switches as and when you see fit.
- Lifestyle – you do not make any investment decisions because this automatically adjusts your mix of funds as your needs change during your working life and aims for a balance between risk and return.
‘Lifestyle’ is the scheme’s automatic investment option.
If you do not choose an investment fund when you join the scheme, contributions will be invested in this option.
The
investment guide has information on:
- making investment decisions and the risks to think about
- the available investment funds, known as ‘passive funds’.
Switching investments
You can switch your investment funds through Hartlink. Alternatively,
you can complete the investment switching form
and send it to BP UK pensions and benefits at Sunbury.
Making things easier
Pensions and investments can be difficult to understand. You can use the
jargon buster to make sense of the trickier concepts and pension jargon.
Take a look at the
myth buster which takes aim at beliefs such as:
- 'I can’t afford the contributions’
- ‘I’m too young to start a pension’
- ‘The government will look after me when I retire’.
If you have any questions, please contact us.
More useful forms