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Social mobility tsar Alan Milburn said his report shows "work is not a cure for poverty"
Working parents in Britain "simply do not earn enough to escape poverty", the government's social mobility tsar Alan Milburn has warned.
Two-thirds of poor children are now from families where an adult works, his report found.
Many low and middle-income children face being "worse off" than their parents because of falling earnings and rising prices, Mr Milburn added.
Wealthier pensioners' benefits should be cut and minimum pay raised, he said.
Mr Milburn suggested some benefits currently protected from cuts - such as free TV licences and winter fuel allowances for pensioners - could be means tested in order to share the burden of austerity more fairly.
But a spokesman for David Cameron said: "The prime minister believes it is right to make commitments to pensioners in relationship to state provision".
The government has pledged to safeguard such benefits until the next general election.
'Two million children'In its first report, the government's Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission warned the target of ending child poverty by 2020 would "in all likelihood be missed by a considerable margin" - leaving as many as two million children in poverty.
Angela Harrison Social affairs correspondent, BBC News
"Britain remains a deeply divided country" - a stinging line from the Social Mobility Commission's first annual report.
"Being born poor often leads to a lifetime of poverty", say the authors, and higher social mobility has become "the new holy grail of public policy".
The report warns social mobility is "flat-lining" after big shifts in the middle of the last century and "could go in to reverse", with the young paying the highest price.
Alan Milburn's recipe for improvement has praise for some government initiatives and strong criticism of others. It calls for higher minimum wages and more universal help so poor working families get help as well as those out of work.
Universities and employers are chided to do more to "open up social elites" and there's a call for older people to be made to dig deeper into their pockets to help future generations.
In an age of austerity, the authors suggest creating a fairer society will be far from pain-free.
Britain still had "high levels of child poverty and low levels of social mobility", it said - with a rising number of children in "absolute poverty" coming from working families.
Two thirds of children officially deemed as being poor now came from a family where at least one parent was working - and in three out of four of those cases, at least one of their parents was working full time, the report found.
It also said the "twin problems of high youth unemployment and falling living standards" were storing up problems for the future.
"Many of today's children face the prospect of having lower living standards than their parents when they grow up," it said.
Among its key recommendations the report urged the government to:
- End long-term youth unemployment by increasing learning and earning opportunities
- Reduce in-work poverty by asking the Low Pay Commission to deliver a higher minimum wage
- Reallocate childcare funding from higher rate taxpayers to help those on Universal Credit
"Just as the UK government has focused on reducing the country's financial deficit it now needs to redouble its efforts to reduce our country's fairness deficit," the report said.
It also argued employers needed to "step up to the plate" and provide higher minimum levels of pay and better training and career development.
'Sharing the burden'Mr Milburn told the BBC: "Today child poverty is a problem for working families rather than the workless or the work-shy."
Around five million people in the country, mainly women, were earning less than the living wage, which is about £7.45 an hour outside of London, he said.
"These are the people frankly who do all the right things, they go out to work, they stand on their own two feet, they look after their families - they're the strivers not the shirkers - and yet they're all too often the forgotten people of Britain and I think they desperately need a new deal."
Mr Milburn said that while ministers and employers could do more, it was unrealistic to expect the government to continue topping up low pay using working tax credits.
He suggested older people could provide part of the solution.
Many pensioners were asking, "shouldn't there be a fairer sharing of the burden?", he insisted.
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Judith Healy: "I watch the pennies just slipping away"
Mr Milburn also advocated a scheme for pairing bright children with the best teachers in an effort to raise attainment.
The former Labour health secretary has previously said social mobility - the idea that individuals can better themselves in terms of educational opportunity, job prospects and salaries from one generation to the next - is "flat-lining".
Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg welcomed the report, but warned that "punishing pensioners isn't going to help a single child achieve more in life".
Shadow work and pensions secretary Rachel Reeves said the "powerful report" showed "ordinary families' living standards [were being] squeezed and social divisions [were] deepening as a result of this government's decisions to put a privileged few first".
On Wednesday, figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) revealed the number of unemployed in the UK fell by 18,000 to 2.49 million in the June-August period.
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