Brain Fade
You've got your big stirring spoon out again haven't you?!
Visuals are not an effective tool for sequencing traffic and therefore will only be employed by controllers in a quiet traffic environment. Visuals don't always save a queue either, maybe you're great at visuals but some pilots aren't and it's often the case that I could vector the aircraft closer than he's prepared to put himself, thus compounding the problem.
Also, I'm sure I've said before, if you want a visual ASK, I'm not genius mind reader and as such don't want to be asking aircraft each time their opinions on visual approaches when I've much better things to do.
rolaaand
I think you've hit one of our gripes on the head! Why, if you can put the traffic to PF to be level by the holding fix, is it not possible to do the same for PH? I'm guessing that 9/10 responses would be 'because I don't have to' . This would be an easy change to make and would then allow us chance to get things in tighter without needing extra miles for descent.
NorthSouth
I have the figures from the NATS intranet for airport movements in front of me. The figures for week 49 (week ending 11/12) show PH with 2224 ATM's and PF 1760. By my humble calculations this is approx 66 more ATM's a day. No, these most certainly don't all happen at night, and therefore will impact on streams of traffic inbound. I hasten to add busier doesn't necessarily mean better OR worse at your job, just a stream of traffic you're presented with!
As for your point about 12/30...... we wish it was more readily available, but it's not! Ho hum!