David Davis' Department for Exiting (DexEu) has attracted a massive amount of media attention as the UK continues its two-year-long divorce talks with Brussels. But outside of the government and in Westminster's Vincent Square, just down the road from Milbank, another group is searching EU regulations for "hidden Brexit nuggets".

The cross-party Red Tape Initiative was founded by ex-trade envoy and Tory peer Jonathan Marland and Oliver Letwin, a former cabinet minister, in December 2016, according to records filed at Companies House.

Letwin, an ally of David Cameron, was tasked by the former prime minister to lead a Brexit unit in the wake of the EU referendum result last June.

However, with Theresa May's appointment to Downing Street that July, he was kicked out of government and had to watch from the sidelines as his task force was transformed into DexEU.

Letwin later teamed up with Nick Tyrone, the former executive director of the CentreForum think-tank, to establish the Red Tape Initiative.

The group is consulting trade unions, business bodies including the Confederation of British Industry and the Institute of Directors, and stakeholders for "bureaucratic loopholes" in EU legislation to remove burdens from key sectors. The construction industry is the initiative's current focus, for instance.

"We are looking at mostly domestic sectors to try and figure out what it is about the EU directives they are desperate to keep and what is it that they have been waiting years to get rid of," Tyrone told IBTimes UK.

"[We are looking for] genuine red rape. By that I mean stuff that is some sort of bureaucratic loophole that something has got caught in that was never meant from the Brussels perspective to apply in that way.

"It either applies that way because of the idiosyncrasies of the way things are done in Britain or it was just poorly scrutinised and it was translated in some sort of nonsensical way."

The policy proposals are then passed by a 10-strong legal and political panel, who decide whether the red tape cutting plan can achieve cross-party support.

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Senior Labour MP and Work and Pensions Committee Chair Frank Field, Liberal Democrat deputy leader Jo Swinson, and top Conservative MP and former Northern Ireland Secretary Theresa Villiers are just some of the politicians involved in the project.

Tyrone stressed that the panels take an advisory role and the group wants sector stakeholders to drive the process. "We don't want to double up on something that is being done by the negotiators," he added.

The initiative then plans to handover its findings to Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and/or DexEU to secure some "quick wins" for the government. "Since we haven't done it yet it might be a chat with DexEu... We will go with the process as it evolves," Tyrone said.

As for funding, the group has a "handful of donors", including GW Pharmaceuticals chairman Geoffrey Guy, but Tyrone denied any connection or money from Tony Pidgley's Berkeley Homes after Private Eye claimed the company was helping fund the initiative. "I've never spoken to this guy," he said.

But a bigger, more fundamental question for the untested group is whether it can beat DexEU, parliamentary committees and MPs in identifying red tape from Brussels.

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