Most of the increase in staffing was clearly linked to the Government's agenda for school improvement.Senior Government sources said the new system required councils to delegate more than in the past. "We have made clear that they do not need lots of extra staff to do what we are expecting of them.". IT IS A broadly dependable rule of thumb that the more questions there are answered in a session of Oral Questions, the more boring that session has been. Yesterday, in Questions to the Secretary of State for Social Security they got through a staggering 29 of them. Granted there were some absences; neither Graham Stringer (No 26) nor Sally Keeble (No 27) answered the speaker's call to put their tabled questions - though it is entirely possible they weren't absent at all, simply comatose after a session of such stupefying dispatch. Taking into account responses and supplementaries and general to-ing and fro-ing, the average length of speech must have been well under two minutes.Not that longer lengths exactly guarantee thrills. During the Kosovo debate that followed, backbenchers were on a rhetorical leash - no speech was allowed to last for longer than 10 minutes, a duration which clearly strikes some MPs as hideously restrictive but which can often seem hopelessly indulgent to onlookers (and indeed, every MP not actually speaking at the time).Robin Cook didn't get a great deal new said in his 40 minutes. He praised the armed forces, public generosity and Clare Short.

He implicitly compared Slobodan Milosevic to Stalin and Hitler and warned him that he was in the frame for war crimes charges.He confirmed the new conditions for an end to hostility and sketched in the diplomatic strategy for the rest of the war and the post-war settlement. But the Foreign Secretary did little to disperse the general fog that hovers over Nato's current attitude to engagement on the ground, or how exactly a recovered Kosovo would be made safe for returning refugees. In his mind's eye Mr Cook seems to have already moved on to rebuilding the infrastructure, long before he has finished knocking it down, let alone discovered whether the knocking down delivers the end he desires.Michael Howard wasn't much more illuminating. Like almost everyone else in the chamber, the Tories now appear to be preparing for ground war - we no longer hear anything of the explicit opposition to ground troops once expressed by William Hague, only grave requests for "clarity" about Nato preparations for such an escalation.Tam Dalyell has spotted this sudden vacancy in the Tory line and asked Mr Howard outright whether he was in favour of taking ground forces in. Mr Howard dodged the question with an agility that should give some comfort to Mr Cook. Then the Liberal Democrats' Menzies Campbell repeated his party's line - a little bit of "We told you so", another argument for the inescapable need for ground troops and a brief detour to defend John Simpson, by suggesting that it was high time Alastair Campbell stopped firing unattributable arrows at a man with his hands tied behind his back.Not much hadn't been said many times before. But Gwyneth Dunwoody did get MPs to pay attention with the arresting opening sentence of her contribution: "As a 20 year old," she said, "I went with my parents to stay with Marshall Tito".While there, the young Gwyneth had apparently quizzed the Yugoslavian generals about the recent victory of their guerrilla forces over the better equipped Germans.Faced with tanks, she learnt, the Yugoslav partisans had simply laid dinner plates on the road.

The Germans, unable to believe they were being opposed by mere crockery, climbed out of their tanks to take a closer look, at which point they were shot by men carrying ancient muzzle-loaders.Out of all the speeches, this alone could be said to have contributed some new intelligence to the war effort. Serbia's porcelain factories will presumably be bracing themselves for air raids.. THE INTERNATIONAL community will have to accept "a more direct responsibility" in Kosovo than previously envisaged once Serb troops have been forced out, Robin Cook said yesterday. The Foreign Secretary proposed during a full-day debate that the administration of Kosovo would have to be placed in the hands of international bodies like the United Nations and the European Union. But amid the toughening of Nato's military action, the Government faced mounting disquiet by backbenchers over its failure to seek Parliament's endorsement of the strikes with a vote. Opening the debate, Mr Cook said the task of reconstruction, both of the shattered villages and of a democratic society within Kosovo, would take the combined efforts of an international protectorate."It would be our preference that a mandate should be provided by a UN Security Council resolution setting up an international administration for Kosovo.

I believe it will not be possible to persuade the refugees to return to their homes without a credible military presence."However, Foreign Office sources said the plans still needed to be discussed with the other Nato member states.Mr Cook went on to warn that the continent was witnessing the "largest forced deportation in Europe since the time of Stalin or Hitler", under a planned assault by Belgrade.He will today hand over a dossier of material "on multiple atrocities" and ethnic cleansing from the past three weeks to the chief prosecutor of the International War Crimes Tribunal.Tony Benn, Labour MP for Chesterfield and leading opponent of the air strikes, argued that the Government's failure to seek Parliament's endorsement reduced MPs to the position "of a sort of press conference where we listen to ministers but have no opportunity to register our views or votes".Kenneth Clarke, the former Chancellor, asked if the proposal of international administration for Kosovo was the "settled policy" of the Government and if it had been agreed by all the allies and with the neighbouring states.Mr Cook replied: "It is going to have to be a much more hands-on operation than we envisaged at Rambouillet in the wake of the last four weeks Yes, that is the view of the Government. It is a view in which we had close discussion with our major allies and I believe it is one ... which is widely shared among our allies."Michael Howard, the shadow Foreign Secretary, pledged his party's continuing support for the action, adding that the Serbs' campaign of ethnic cleansing was the "most dire return to the dreadful reality" of the Second World War.But while he would be the "last person to minimise the impact of the Nato campaign" it was time to face the "deeply unpalatable" fact that the bombing had not stopped the ethnic cleansing. It was time to reconsider how Nato could achieve its objectives, as it was clear from the "substantial reinforcements" now being made that the Alliance's original assessment had been "too optimistic".Menzies Campbell, for the Liberal Democrats, said there were both "moral and pragmatic" reasons for stopping Serbia's "flagrant abuse of humanitarian standards"."I believe that these objectives which we have set out can be attained but it will not be easy... the threat and indeed the use of ground forces will be an essential component in the achievement of any settlement," he said.He added: "But if we are to ask our young men and increasingly our young women to risk their lives in the furtherance of political objectives, then surely they ought to know that they have had the endorsement of the House of Commons."Gwyneth Dunwoody, Labour MP for Crewe and Nantwich, said it was "extremely difficult" on occasions for MPs to express unease about the way the situation was developing without that being construed as undermining the efforts of Britain's forces or their support of government."I will certainly find it difficult to support the commitment of ground troops if they go in to fight their way into a province which, frankly, is not only geographically extremely difficult for this kind of war, but also against very committed and certainly very tough opponents.". THE FATE of the former Labour MP Fiona Jones still hung in the balance last night after the Speaker of the House of Commons declared that her reinstatement was a matter for the courts and not Parliament. Betty Boothroyd, the Speaker, said that it was for the High Court to decide whether Mrs Jones could be restored as MP for Newark after her successful appeal against conviction for election expenses fraud. Mrs Jones, who won the seat with a majority of 3,000 at the last election, was stripped of office when she was found guilty at Nottingham Crown Court of submitting misleading expenses claims.However, the High Court quashed the conviction last week, claiming that the jury in the earlier case had been misdirected by the judge.Both Mrs Jones and the Labour Party expected that she would be swiftly reinstated as an MP, but the Speaker's office decided that it needed time to assess the judgment.Yesterday, Mrs Boothroyd announced she had instructed the Attorney-General, John Morris, to apply to the High Court for a ruling on how the 1983 Representation of the People Act should be interpreted.

She said that the case had given rise to an "unprecedented situation" where the Commons had declared a seat vacant on conviction of its MP, but was subsequently faced with her effective acquittal by a more senior court.On the one hand there was a need for natural justice to be done, she said, but on the other, whatever the outcome of an appeal, it was interpretation of the Act that was important. "It is for the courts and not for the House to interpret the law. I hope very much that it may be disposed of speedily," Mrs Boothroyd said."The court will be invited to make a declaration that following the decision of the Court of Appeal to quash her conviction, Fiona Jones is entitled to resume her seat." The Speaker added that once this case had been resolved, the Act should be reviewed to prevent similar difficulties arising in future.Given the small size of Mrs Jones's majority, the Government is anxious to avoid a by-election that could give the Tories a much-needed fillip.Even though the Court of Appeal judges ruled last week that the conviction was quashed and "all consequences" that flowed from it should be quashed, a strict reading of the 1983 Act makes reinstatement difficult. The Speaker's office declared soon after the judgment that there was no provision for reinstatement in the Act.