Up to four libraries could close in Liverpool, as the city council takes the scalpel to budgets in the latest battle between central and local government over funding cuts. If the closures go ahead it will mean the city has lost more than half its libraries in the last two years.

The future of the as yet unnamed libraries is being considered as part of a plan to plug a £90m hole in the council’s budget over the next three years. It comes on top of cuts of £330m made since 2010, the city’s mayor Joe Anderson said. He has set up a task force to review the library service, with a view to saving £1.6m in the financial year 2018/19.

Though alternative plans for keeping the libraries open will be considered, Anderson was pessimistic about the likelihood that closures could be avoided. “Hopefully we will be able to do things like transfer the running of libraries to community groups,” he said. “But it is likely that around four libraries will close in 2019.”

The cuts have been forced on the council by continued pressure on local authority budgets from central government, the mayor claimed. “These are not things that we want to do but we have no choice, because the government isn’t listening and as the majority of people who responded to our budget consultation said they wouldn’t support a one-off 10% rise in council tax,” he said.

A spokesman for the council added: “By 2020, our budget will be 68% lower than it was a decade earlier. Our priorities are protecting the most vulnerable so we are cutting less from adults and children’s social care than from other areas.”

Support for Anderson’s call for Westminster to support councils came from the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP). Nick Poole, CILIP chief executive, said: “This is yet another example of the severe financial pressures that local authorities are under. We back Liverpool city council’s call to central government to provide more support so they can run statutory services such as public libraries.”

Poole called on national and local government to support a raft of measures to protect library services across the country, including emergency relief funding, strengthened national support and “realistic long-term planning” when services are transferred to community ownership.

The cuts will come as a blow to the remaining 13 branch libraries and the central library, which have already faced sharp cuts. Three libraries were closed in Liverpool in 2012, with a further four transferred to community organisations, including Walton library, which has become a “centre for learning, recovery, health and wellbeing” run by the Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust. Another library in the district of Kensington has approval to be transferred to a local community association as soon as the legal process has been completed, the spokesman said. The city also operates a home library service.

The spokesman added that handing some library services over to outside organisations had been a “halfway house solution” to avoid closure. Of the remaining 14 libraries, including the Central library, run by the council, he added: “We don’t know how many of these 14 may be closed or asset-transferred in future … but it definitely won’t be Central Library.”

At the end of last year the Libraries Taskforce, which was set up by the government to find a solution to the ailing sector, produced a report outlining a national strategy to turn around services in England and Wales. A £4m innovation fund to help disadvantaged communities was among the schemes outlined in the Libraries Deliver report.

However, campaigners have claimed it is too little too late, with library loans continuing their steep slide downwards, according to Nielsen LibScan. Official figures released by the government at the end of last year revealed library budgets in England and Wales had taken a £25m hit in the year to March 2016. Libraries minister Rob Wilson has vowed to protect them from further cuts, and has this year visited those authorities facing the most swingeing cuts.