A lot of you have jumped on marvo, have you actually read his post? He wasn't the handling pilot at the time, and the point being made is that although his colleague selected an innapropriate mode of descent to achieve the requested speed promtly, there was very little time between the initial instruction and the follow up from the ATCO. I'm sure marvo would have said something had he been given time. It is useful to know you guys have all the info with the enhanced mode S, as it is blatantly obvious that some pilots, particularly at places like lgw, are not flying asssigned speeds, which completely wrecks the sequence causing problems for everyone.
The flip side of this is crews who don't tell the controller that they plan to slow right down on final approach, slower than instructed, thus reducing separation behind them
Again using lgw as an example, it is a regular occurence that we may reduce from 220kts back towards 200-180kts on a loc intercept heading. This is nearly always due to a high workload for the controller resulting in a late instruction to reduce, and a busy frequency making it hard to get a call in, so we pre-empt slightly. Reducing below 170kts only ever happens once we are through 6dme (company policy - ezy).
I think speed control at later stages in the approach is sometimes badly complied with from our side of the fence because we regularly get left fast and often high on profile by some European ATC agencies who ask for "enthusiastic" speeds and then neglect/forget to cancel the restriction until it is basically too late, so slowing down without the nod from ATC, often a requirement when operating in some parts of Spain and pretty much the whole of Italy, becomes commonplace if there is any doubt that we are going to meet our stable at 1000'/500' policy.
Unfortunately not every country offers the level of ATC service we get throughout the UK. If you can get a jumpseat ride, get on a sector to Pisa - you'll be amazed at what ATC there expect us to do. The basic laws of physics and gravity don't seem to figure much in their MATS!