More than £60 million has been earmarked for Renfrewshire and East Renfrewshire in a bid to boost the affordable housing market.

The huge cash injection is part of the Scottish Government’s £1.75 billion pledge to help local authorities and house-builders plan their investment and provide certainty on the amount of funding available until 2021.

Renfrewshire Council will receive instalments of £13.8m, £15.6m and £16.7m over the next three years.

And there will be around £5.2m allocated to East Renfrewshire Council in 2018/19, rising to £5.9m in 2019/20 and £6.3m in 2020/21.

Mhairi Black, MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire South, has welcomed the funding boost.

She said: “This funding commitment provides certainty for Renfrewshire, to allow the council and partners to plan for the next few years.

“Increasing the supply of affordable homes is a key commitment and vital to the SNP’s ambition of tackling poverty and inequality in our society.

“With a huge number of affordable homes approved last year, we can be confident that our programme is on course to deliver for Scotland.”

A spokesman for East Renfrewshire Council said the investment will be put towards realising the vision set out in the local authority’s draft Strategic Housing Investment Plan (SHIP,), which will deliver on the key priorities identified in our Local Housing Strategy.

He added: “Our planned programme of investment focuses on new homes for rent from the council and housing associations and includes our recently-approved Council House Build Programme.

“This will see 120 new council homes built over the next four years, the first large-scale programme of its kind for East Renfrewshire Council.”

Housing Minister Kevin Stewart said that increasing the funding package for affordable housing year-on-year supports the Scottish Government’s promise to deliver 50,000 additional properties by 2021.

He continued: “We are ensuring that Renfrewshire and East Renfrewshire have homes that are high-quality, efficient and affordable.

“We are announcing to local authorities how much money they’ll have to invest in affordable housing until the end of this Parliament. It means they can plan these new affordable homes now, with the certainty that the funding will increase year-on-year.

“This is also an important signal to the house-building sector in Scotland and demonstrates our commitment to the industry and the estimated 14,000 jobs our affordable housing supply programme supports each year.”

Latest statistics show a level of activity in the affordable house-building sector not seen in Scotland since the early 1980s, with 10,276 affordable homes approved in 2016/17 – a 29 per cent increase on the year before.