Mayors and local authorities must be trusted to deal rapidly with new coronavirus outbreaks, as well as being given powers to take charge of blighted cities’ economic recoveries, Dan Jarvis, the mayor of Sheffield city region, has said. Jarvis said the handling of the pandemic – particularly the confusion over testing data, which many authorities have claimed slowed their response – must mark a “culture change” in Whitehall, with local knowledge prioritised. Sheffield and Barnsley, where Jarvis is the Labour MP, have been grappling to stem local outbreaks that had put the area at risk of local lockdown. Jarvis said that although there had been improvements in data sharing, lessons had to be learned from how the crisis had been handled so far – and that it was equally important for the government to hand down powers for the economic response to the crisis to local government, which could better target that response. “You cannot fight this disease, or rebuild our economy, sitting in Whitehall and just looking at infection numbers or unemployment rates in different postcodes – you need to be on the ground to be able to respond most effectively,” Jarvis told the Guardian. “And the government needs to empower us to do that.” Jarvis said the controlling approach thus far had meant vital local knowledge was being overlooked until far later in the process and that he feared it would remain the case when it came to top-down government spending to revive local economies. Senior local authority figures are understood to be concerned that the chancellor Rishi Sunak’s summer statement had no concrete assurances about specific regional interventions for economic recovery. “We cannot afford to repeat the mistakes of the public health response in the economic recovery from Covid,” Jarvis said. “That means we have to harness the local knowledge and insight of mayors, councils and business leaders. Our renewal plan is based on a fine-grained understanding of our strengths and weaknesses.” Jarvis said there had been several instances in recent weeks, as Barnsley and Sheffield battled to contain the virus, in which local authorities had been able to tackle the source of an outbreak faster than central government. “We’ve had some higher numbers than we would like in parts of both Sheffield and Barnsley recently. But the Barnsley cases were centred around industrial workplaces, while the Sheffield cases were linked to high-occupancy housing,” he said. “The public health response is very different when you have that understanding. Another example is that one of our directors of public health was alerted to a cluster of cases and was able to react better because they knew there was a local residential care site there. “An over-centralised approach risks undermining the effort to control Covid. We have to harness the power of local knowledge and insight on public health – otherwise we risk undermining our efforts to control the virus and then recover from one of the greatest threats this country has ever seen.” The health secretary, Matt Hancock, is set to grant local public health teams full access to the names and data of people in their areas who tested positive for Covid-19, and those with whom they have been in contact, something local public health officials said had been needed for weeks and had hampered in efforts to combat and prevent local outbreaks. A government source told the Observer that data would be made available subject to the necessary data safeguards. On Monday, the prime minister’s spokesman said the government was “planning to enhance the data we provide to local public health teams on the ground to make sure they have information they need to fight the virus”. Boris Johnson announced on Friday that councils in England would be given new powers to close shops, cancel events and shut outdoor spaces to manage local outbreaks. Sheffield, along with Bradford and Kirklees, was originally identified as one in three locations “requiring enhanced support”, which was leaked to the Observer. The city is still named as an area of concern for Public Health England but has moved out of the category for requiring extra support, according to the body’s latest weekly surveillance report. On Sunday, Rochdale became the second town in north-west England to bring in localised measures to try and stop the spread of the virus, after Blackburn with Darwen introduced local rules on households mixing and mask-wearing to try and prevent a government-mandated lockdown similar to Leicester’s.