A housing minister has rejected suggestions that Andy Burnham has failed to his keep promises on council housing, as the government unveiled a nearly £10bn plan to boost “genuinely affordable homes”.

The prime minister has pledged to carry out the biggest council housebuilding programme since the postwar period, with more than 70,000 homes, 60% allocated for social rent, to be delivered across England.

However, Burnham has faced accusation of watering down his ambitions after he previously called for the entire £39bn social and affordable homes programme to be spent on council housing.

Asked whether he accepted that Burnham had failed to keep promises made in the lead-up to the byelection, housing minister Matthew Pennycook told BBC Breakfast:

No, I don’t. I mean, Andy Burnham said in the byelection that he wanted to see more money spent on social rent on council housebuilding.

That’s exactly what we’re doing through this initial wave of funding.

Good morning and welcome to the UK politics live blog.

The government has set out its plans to spend an initial £10bn on a mix of subsidised housing in England, with a target of 60% being social renting.

The funding, which comes from the 10-year Affordable Homes Programme, is in line with the Starmer government’s policy and sees Andy Burnham backtrack on his proposal to rip up housing plans and boost social home building.

Burnham previously called for the programme to be spent entirely on social homes, which are more heavily subsidised and therefore more affordable than other types of government-funded housing.

He said when launching his campaign to become MP for Makerfield:

There’s £39bn allocated over a 10-year period … I’m saying that should be dedicated to council homes. Let’s not be coy any more … I’m saying council homes because control matters.

Under the plans announced on Monday, however, £10bn will be spent helping to build 70,000 homes outside London, about 60% of which will be social rented houses. The rest will be other types of accommodation such as shared ownership schemes and sheltered housing.

London will get another £6bn, which will be allocated at a later date.

Ministers said the investment would help bring the government closer to its promise of building 300,000 affordable homes over the next 10 years. It will be spent by 33 “strategic partners”, who will be guaranteed funding for the next decade to help deliver their plans.

The Guardian has learned that for the first time in the history of the scheme, three of those partners will be local councils, as the government looks to deliver what Burnham has promised will be “the biggest council housebuilding programme since the postwar period”.

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