The trouble is that, because that scandal is still so fresh in its mind, the Consumers' Association seems to smell a rat when there is any attempt at innovation in the mortgage market. The latest edition of its magazine, Consumer Choice, puts pension mortgages at the top of its list of the top 10 mis-selling scandals, ahead of notorious rip-offs such as payment protection and mobile phone insurance.

According to Consumer Choice, pension-backed lending is little more than a sinister attempt to resurrect endowment mortgages under a different guise. In fact, it seems to assume that they will inevitably spell disaster for the borrower, claiming: "The policy growth is not guaranteed which means that, not only will your policy not be worth enough to pay off the mortgage, your pension income may be smaller than you expected."

This will strike anybody familiar with the product as odd. On the surface, there are many similarities with endowment mortgages.

Both require only the payment of interest over the lifetime of the loan, with the borrower building up a separate pot of cash from which to pay off the mortgage in one go.

There's always the risk that the pot won't be big enough, leading to the type of mortgage shortfalls being suffered in Britain. But there's also the possibility of overshooting the target, leaving the borrower sitting on a nice nest egg after the mortgage is gone.

The difference lies in the way that pot of money is put together. With an endowment mortgage, you save through an ordinary investment fund. With a pension mortgage, you get a helping hand from the taxman so that, if done correctly, you effectively repay the loan from tax-free earnings. This does not make it risk free and no amount of tax breaks can compensate for a bad investment. But at least it minimises the chances of being left with a mortgage shortfall at retirement.

The Consumers' Association seems to have overlooked the crucial tax advantage in its haste to include pension mortgages to its blacklist. It also ignored the fact that they are pitched as a niche product for people who know what they are getting into, typically property investors rather than home buyers.

To qualify for a pension mortgage, the banks will need to be convinced that you are likely to have a sizeable pension when you retirement. This is because only one-quarter of that pension can be taken taxfree and this lump sum must be big enough to pay off the mortgage.

Endowment mortgages were a very different animal, flogged a piece of clever financial engineering to anybody who would listen. In their heyday they accounted for a big chunk of the home loans market, even though it subsequently transpired that few people really understood the risks involved or that their homes would be on the line in the event of a mortgage shortfall.

But perhaps the biggest difference is that the odds were deliberately stacked against the borrower who signed up for an endowment mortgage.

The enthusiasm with which they were sold was directly related to the bumper commissions kicked back to the people selling them. It was not unusual for them to pocket 90% or more of the payments made in the early years of the mortgage. With that type of drag on investment performance, it was little wonder that so many endowments fell short of target.

The era of high charges might not exactly be over but at least today's investors can be sure of getting a much fairer deal.

Endowment mortgages have left an understandable legacy of suspicion about banks and their motives.

But it would be a shame if it blinkered us to the merits of genuine innovation in the mortgage market.