Well, yes, it is an opinion, but it happens to be the opinion of High Court judge Mrs Justice King, who has had access to the gruesome evidence in this deeply disturbing case and came to the conclusion that Khyra Ishaq would probably still be alive today had welfare officials performed their duties properly.
Mrs King's judgment in Family Court proceedings totally demolishes the council's claim that nothing more could have been done to save Khyra because her mother had withdrawn her from school to educate her at home.
This was the line relied upon by Birmingham children's director Tony Howell and cabinet member Les Lawrence, who told a media briefing that legislation giving parents the right to withdraw children from school gave local authorities no powers to enter houses to inspect the arrangements for schooling at home.
In fact, as Mrs Justice King points out, the council had sufficient powers under the Children Act to enter the house where Khyra was being held.
A senior educational social worker, named in court as Miss G, believed wrongly that she needed Angela Gordon's permission to conduct an assessment on Khyra, and when that permission was not given she went away and did not conduct the assessment.
In the words of Mrs Justice King: "This showed a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the referral on Miss G's part. The referrals did indeed come from the school and an educational social worker but they were not educational in nature.
"The school's referral was unequivocal. It was an issue over the children being hungry, thin and cold which were of concern ."
Had Miss G insisted on spending time with Khyra and her siblings, as she was entitled to do, she would have recognised from the appearance of starving and malnourished children that an urgent investigation was necessary.
Mrs Justice King's damning conclusion is as follows: "I can only conclude that in all probability had there been an adequate initial assessment and proper adherence by the educational welfare services to its guidance, Khyra would not have died.
"Merely looking at the photographs of the house and the conditions in which the children were living confirms in my mind that had social services even seen the bedroom in which the children lived or the manner in which they were fed, they would undoubtedly have intervened."
Ah, yes, let's just remind ourselves of the eating arrangements.
"The children were fed in either one or two bowls which were taken upstairs and put on the floor in the room in which they lived. They ate like puppies around and from a communal bowl." It was quite literally survival of the fittest for the few scraps they were given, and Khyra was not the fittest, so she died.
There you have it. Treated like dogs and slowly starved by a deranged mother and her boyfriend, while social workers and education officials walked away from the front door washing their hands of all responsibility and claiming they had done all they could.
No one at Birmingham City Council, as far as we know, has been disciplined or even ticked off for dereliction of duty.
And Mr Howell and Coun Lawrence sail serenely on.