Collective Switching refers to a type of service which facilitates the switching of service providers (specifically utility providers) that occurs in the United Kingdom, Australia, the Netherlands, and Ireland. It refers to the concept of getting a group of customers together in order to negotiate a group deal with a common provider of a service or product (normally gas and electricity supply). In the UK this has always been managed by a third party which gathers the consumers together into a grouping via a registration or membership model and then takes their collective demand to the supply base and obtains from a supplier preferential or bespoke rates for that group of consumers.