The government has deceived us, again. The recent public relations coup of helping hard-pressed families etc by postponing the fuel duty rise is really disingenuous. It's all about saving money and it works like this:

A rise of fuel duty now would feed straight into September's inflation data - the Consumer Price Index. This is a key month because it is used to calculate the increase of public sector pensions and benefits from the following April. Perhaps they would have scored more brownie points by being honest?