Collective switching

Collective Switching is where customers negotiate a group deal with a utility service such as gas or electricity. The practice has been popular in the United Kingdom, Australia, the Netherlands, and Ireland. In the UK, collective switching 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.

There is no set model for how individual schemes operate, although a third party, such as an energy broker, usually seeks to negotiate a better energy tariff with energy suppliers on behalf of the group. Davidson and Cirell argue that, to be successful, a scheme must operate transparently and efficiently, "with the motives of the organiser being geniune".