You seem to live in a very black and white world Aviophage.
It is common for even the most sensible and well planned descent to be thrown out the window if ATC decide to cut you short on approach (although EGLL/EGKK are usually very good at giving you track miles to go and sticking to it thats far from the norm in the rest of Europe) and I'd be surprised if you haven't been in the situation where the approach controller is asking you to keep up speed and on handover to tower you're asked to slow to minimum approach speed all the while you're trying performing a low noise/fuel efficient CDA.
No one should be planning a descent and approach with the use of speedbrake but they are there to be used if the situation changes and other means of slowing down/getting down aren't appropriate. Most manufactures don't recommend speedbrake with flaps for the reasons given it but leave it available for use if required.
Based on being in Flaps 1 config in this situation I'd hazard a guess that they were on approach in the 10-15 mile region - now if you are less than 5 miles final and still needing speedbrake, for what worth it is at that late stage, then you should be perhaps be asking how you got into that situation and thinking about bugging out.