Northern Ireland’s Assembly and Executive are failing to take tough fiscal decisions with rampant waste in public spending, said Ulster Unionist Party leader Jon Burrows.However, the institutions were “designed to exist, not to excel” by the architects of the Belfast Agreement, to “get the place up and running” with as many “checks and balances as possible”, he told the Patrick MacGill Summer School on Saturday. Burrows said the lack of collective Cabinet responsibility laid down in the agreement made it difficult for any one party to act. “If you’re going to make tough decisions like closing schools or hospitals, why would any individual party want to take that responsibility and then be hammered at the polls?” The UUP leader also called into question the “quality” of politicians and said reforms of Stormont are long overdue, where people can “hide behind other people’s performance”.Pointing to rampant waste in public spending, Burrows told the summer school that painting jobs that should cost £4,000 (€4,700) are instead costing the taxpayer £12,000. “It’s always about 400 per cent more. For every bit of equipment, every service, we multiply that across Northern Ireland. There is no central procurement strategy. It is an abiding scandal the amount of money that’s wasted in procurement.” He said London should tie extra money to reforms, that there was “a kind of immaturity about expecting a bailout”.He rejected the idea that a unity referendum was required, saying the support existing for it was nowhere near the threshold laid down by the 1998 Agreement. The vast majority of people in the Republic, he believed, did not have unification anywhere near the top of their political priorities.He paid tribute to late Ulster Unionist Party leader David Trimble who had been “treated appallingly” over the agreement – an issue that split unionists “right down the middle, split families down the middle”.Declaring his strong support for the continuing union with Britain, Burrows congratulated the Republic on the “extraordinary” economic successes it has enjoyed in recent decades.“I admire what you’ve done for the world. I mean, wherever you go, the Irish are held up as people who are hospitable, friendly, peaceable. I think that’s a wonderful thing. I think that has actually a value that’s economic as well as part of your intrinsic pride,” he said. However, he said the Republic was still not fully engaged in dealing with Troubles legacy issues, while the majority of extradition requests made by the United Kingdom during the Troubles were rejected by Southern courts.Criticising anti-immigrant protests this summer in Northern Ireland, Burrows said its economy could not function without migrant workers: “My granny’s hand was held in her dying days by a Filipino nurse. I’ll never forget that. “If you attack Filipino care workers, I will stand up for them because they’re making a bigger contribution than some people who live in our country, born in our country, who haven’t done a day’s work.”However, most migrants have “done all the hard work getting here and filled all the forms and done it the right way and made a contribution despite the fact that there are those who’ve done it illegally”.