If you work at bp right now, or have done recently, you’ll know it has been quite a ride.
A new CEO. A restructured board. Thousands of redundancies over the past 18 months. The chairman fired. A new two-division structure announced just last week. By any measure, bp is going through one of the most significant periods of change in its recent history.
Over 25 years of working with bp employees and their families, we’ve sat with people through the Deepwater Horizon fallout, through oil price crashes, through previous rounds of cuts and restructuring. We’ve seen this movie before. Not exactly this movie, but something very like it.
Our view, for what it’s worth: these moments tend to work out better than people fear going in.
A genuine new chapter
Meg O’Neill took the helm on 1 April 2026, becoming bp’s first female CEO and its first external appointment in over a century. She came from Woodside Energy, where she grew the business into the largest energy company on the Australian Securities Exchange. The board’s stated ambition is clear: simpler, leaner, more profitable.
The two-division restructure announced earlier this month, separating upstream and downstream into cleaner reporting lines, is exactly the kind of decisive move that backs it up. It may cause disruption in the short term. Across an organisation of bp’s size, it almost certainly will. But the direction looks clearer than it has in a while.
What about the people caught in the middle?
If you’re facing redundancy, have already taken it, or are watching colleagues leave and wondering what your own future looks like, we understand that none of this feels abstract.
But here’s what we’ve learned from working through exactly these moments with bp employees for over 25 years: a redundancy, navigated well, often opens a door that people didn’t know was there.
Sometimes that door leads somewhere financial. More often than not, when people sit down and properly add up what they have, what they’re owed, and what their options look like, the picture is stronger than they expected. But sometimes the door leads somewhere more personal. Is this the moment to step back from corporate life? To consult rather than be employed? To start something new? To retire earlier than planned and spend time differently? We’ve seen all of these, and more than once the person who came to us worried about redundancy left with a plan they were genuinely excited about.
We’re not being glib about a difficult situation; it’s simply what we observe. Forced transitions, when handled well, have a habit of producing better outcomes than the ones people would have chosen themselves.
The financial side, because it matters
A bp redundancy package is rarely just the redundancy payment. When you add up all the elements, the picture often looks different to what people initially assume.
Being made redundant or taking voluntary redundancy typically means being classified as a ‘good leaver’. That matters enormously. It affects your share awards, the timing of any pension benefits, and the reduction rates that apply if you access your pension early. The difference between leaving as a good leaver and resigning can be worth tens of thousands of pounds.
For those in the bp defined benefit pension scheme who are over 55, redundancy can open the door to accessing that pension immediately, with more favourable reduction rates than you might expect. If you’re under 55, you can’t access it yet, but locking in good leaver status still has significant long-term value.
If you’ve built up savings in the Aegon TargetPlan DC pension, a redundancy event is also the moment to think carefully about where those assets go next and how they fit into a broader plan.
And then there are the shares. ISVPs, GSVPs, Share Match, ShareSave. Good leaver status affects the timing and vesting of all of them, and getting that right matters. We cover the full picture in Making bp Redundancy Work for You.
The bit we say every time
The clients who come out of a bp redundancy in the strongest position are almost always the ones who took the time to understand what they had before making any decisions. Not after. Before.
The temptation is to either panic and cash everything out, or to do nothing and wait for the dust to settle. Neither is usually the right answer.
If you’re in the middle of all of this right now, or know someone who is, we’re always happy to have a conversation.
Who can you think of that’s facing a redundancy at bp, or watching their team being restructured? If this is relevant to someone you know, sharing it could save them from making a costly decision without the full picture.
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Want to learn more about how we help bp Leaders optimise their finances? Explore our bp services page here. If you’d like to discuss your specific situation, you can get in touch with our team directly.
This is for educational purposes only. It’s not personal financial advice and we’re not recommending any specific course of action. Everyone’s situation is different, and the decisions that are right for you around redundancy, pension access and share schemes depend on individual circumstances. You should seek professional financial advice before making any decisions.
While we have extensive experience helping bp employees and alumni optimise their benefits, Emery Little operates independently and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the bp group, including BP Pension Trustees Limited, on behalf of the BP Pension Fund. This allows us to provide objective, independent guidance focused solely on your best interests.
