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Phil Whitehouse, head of The Mortgage Alliance, said a potential solution to the issue of dual pricing would to be to create a standard template letter of authority accepted by all lenders so advisers would not have to turn away customers if a direct deal was best suited for them.

Mr Whitehouse said: "This is a potential positive. Obviously this would require a great deal of co-operation from various areas of the market to come up with some kind of industry standard but I know this is certainly something TMA would back in order to help alleviate such problems."

Both Britannia Building Society and Skipton Building Society said they would be willing to accept a standard letter of authority from advisers to act on their clients behalf but Nationwide, Woolwich and RBS ruled out such an arrangement at the current time.

Jason Clarke, head of PR for Skipton Building Society, said: "We are keen to keep working with advisers in these unusual times. This is an interesting and innovative suggestion. We would certainly be open to discussing the practicalities of such an arrangement."

Jayne Dono, PR manager for Britannia Building Society, said: "At Britannia, putting our customers first is at the heart of everything we do so it is important we listen to them - if they tell us to deal with the adviser directly that is what we will do."

However, Nationwide and RBS said a standardised letter of authority was not something they would consider, while HBoS, Abbey and Alliance & Leicester declined to comment on the subject.

Matthew Wyles, group executive director of non-retail business for Nationwide, said: "We do not have any interest or appetite for letters of authority pertaining to direct exclusives. In the same way we would not get our branches involved in selling an intermediary exclusive.

"We are not going to get into a dialogue with an intermediary about a direct to consumer product."

Chris Pearson, director of intermediary mortgages for RBS, said: "At this point in time, it is difficult to provide a specific response to this idea but we would expect more advisers would explore the possibilities of diversifying their advice territories, generating income from non-mortgage products and charging clients fees."

David Finlay, intermediary business director for Woolwich, said: "The suggestion as outlined could undermine plans to control the flow of customers to the business, encouraging unsustainable levels and distorting our commercial plan."

Richard Farr, director of the Association of Mortgage Intermediaries, said: "The biggest focus is on fixing liquidity. That is all what we should be attempting to do rather than putting sticky plasters here, there and everywhere.

"It is quite a small thing to get quite a lot of people to agree to and I do not think it will have that great an impact to be fair. It would be great if we could get it but there are more important things going on."