The UK government has released £60m ($73.64m) in funding to develop more than 6,000 new homes on unused brownfield sites across the country.

The UK Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities will allocate the grant to local councils to transform unused brownfield sites into usable communities.

The councils that will receive this funding include Hull, Somerset, Newcastle and Sunderland.

Newcastle will receive £1.82m to assist its regional redevelopment by transferring a complex site for the construction of 146 build-to-rent houses for the Benwell and Scotswood areas.

Hull will receive £980,000 to build 99 new affordable for-rent houses on the site of a former school as part of the city centre's transformation. 

Sunderland Council will receive £1.8m to transform a former riverfront industrial site unused for more than two decades into 140 low-carbon build-to-rent properties at Farringdon Row.

Some of these regeneration projects are set to create thousands of jobs.

This funding is part of the second phase of the government's £180m Brownfield Land Release Fund. It will help to restore abandoned car parks, industrial sites and buildings in town centres.

UK Housing and Planning Minister Rachel Maclean stated: “We know we need to build more homes, but this cannot come at the expense of concreting over our precious countryside.

“That is why we are doing all we can to make sure we’re making use of wasteland and unused brownfield land, so we can turn these eyesores into beautiful and thriving communities.

“This is all part of our long-term plan for housing - making sure we deliver the homes we need across the country.”

This project follows the success of the first phase of the Brownfield Land Release Fund 2, which enabled the land release of more than 2,400 houses.