The mayors of Greater Manchester and Liverpool city region have called on ministers to take a “much more locally focused” response to the coronavirus crisis, urging them to loosen Whitehall’s control of areas such as testing and personal protective equipment. Andy Burnham said he did not want to gratuitously criticise central government but said its focus had been “very, very nationally driven” and was creating problems in the regions. The government has faced criticism over its easing of the nationwide lockdown and plans to reopen schools in a fortnight, with council leaders from across the north of England saying it is too early to lift the restrictions in their areas. In Yorkshire and the north-east of England, the rate of infection is double that in London, according to latest figures from Public Health England. Burnham has pressed for the eight regional metro mayors – who represent nearly 12 million people in England, or one in five of the population – to be given a seat at the table of the government’s Cobra meetings, alongside the London mayor Sadiq Khan and leaders of the devolved nations, but this has not yet been agreed by ministers. He said Whitehall-focused decision-making was creating issues locally, such as a drive-through testing facility for NHS staff that was opened at Manchester airport – miles from the region’s major hospitals. “It might have made sense in an office in Whitehall but it doesn’t make sense if you live in Greater Manchester,” he added. “On testing, on PPE, on volunteers, they would have made life easier for themselves had they picked up the phone to me and [other mayors],” said the former Labour health secretary. “The response has been very, very nationally driven but the recovery has got to be much more locally driven. Local leaders should have much more control of issues like testing.” The chronic shortage of protective equipment for NHS staff has emerged as one of the biggest challenges for Boris Johnson’s government. In Greater Manchester, the only region that has devolved healthcare powers, Burnham established a PPE taskforce that has ordered 19m pieces of essential kit to hospitals and care homes and has so far delivered 4.8m, with a further 5.2m due to arrive in the next seven days. He said the shortage of PPE would have been a “much bigger problem” if the region had not sourced its own equipment. Other metro mayors, including Steve Rotheram in Liverpool and Andy Street in the West Midlands, have also launched local appeals for the supply of PPE amid frustration with the government’s “priority drops” system. One promised consignment of 500,000 items to Greater Manchester ended up delivering only 48,000 pieces, Burnham said, while other regions have reported similar issues. Rotheram said “trying to do everything from a national system hasn’t worked as well as we’d all have liked” and that the government “could and should” have involved local government more with PPE, coordinating testing sites and rolling out the tracing programmes. “Mayors, councils, and the local NHS are all closer to the situation on the ground than Whitehall and we know the needs of our communities better,” he added. “Now I worry government are making the same mistake again when it comes to changes to lockdown measures, which are being pushed down from a national level, with little to no local engagement.” The calls from mayors came as the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) said it had developed a way to measure the local impact of lifting lockdown measures in real time, suggesting local leaders could be given a greater role in easing the restrictions in their areas. The model uses mobility data from Google to monitor how busy a particular place is at a particular time, alongside Public Health England data on the number of infections at a local authority level. It uses this data to calculate the infection rate for that area and track it alongside any increase or decrease in mobility. For example, it said mobility in the UK was 44% of its usual level in the first week of May, while in the same week the spread of the virus was slowing by about 21 percentage points over a five-day period. They concluded that the UK could increase mobility to 51% of usual levels without pushing the R value – the rate at which one infected person passes it to others – above the crucial threshold of one. However, it said the virus still appears to be accelerating in 14 areas – including York, Slough and the Isle of Wight – where mobility could be further reduced to bring the outbreak under control. Ian Mulheirn, the TBI’s executive director, said: “As lockdown measures start to lift, the government will be driving by looking in the rear-view mirror. We have little sense currently of what impact the different steps will have on the all-important R number, and will only find out many days later, when deaths and new cases start to rise. “By establishing the link between mobility and the rate of spread of the virus, we have developed a real-time indicator of the effect of different easing measures, allowing the economy to be opened up safely and early targeted intervention to be taken if the virus looks likely to spread in local areas.”