The English Funding Council has announced its intention to invite tenders for the contract currently held by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA), and the Australian government is promoting a Bill to curb the activities of the equivalent body, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency. This article compares the two agencies, and it draws upon debates and developments in Australia to interpret recent changes in QAA's relationship with universities focusing, in particular, on the significance of the "UK Quality Code for Higher Education" and the new single review method--Higher Education Review. The authors suggest that QAA's current crisis may have been precipitated by its failure to attend to the concerns of its members (Universities UK and the other representative bodies). The article concludes by proposing three basic principles which should govern the design of any new method for the review of UK higher education institutions.