What conclusions should parents draw from the research programme on the safety of mobile phones?

Proving that they are 100 per cent safe, for all time, is impossible. Nothing in life, from crossing a road to eating a bacon sandwich, can earn that grade of safety certificate.

As far as we can tell, on the experience gained so far, there is no evidence mobile phones or the masts that broadcast signals can damage anybody’s health, and that includes children.

Experience of widescale use of mobile phones is only about a decade old, however, and children have only started using them in large numbers even more recently. It remains just possible that longer-term studies will reveal some link to cancer, which takes at least a decade to manifest itself.

The odds of this are very low, because the experiments so far have shown no plausible biological mechanism by which cancer could be triggered. Radio-frequncy radiation does not damage DNA, and nor has any other effect been found that could provide such a mechanism.

The mobile phone scare has always lacked plausibility. Radio frequency signals have been around since the invention of radio - more than a century - without evidence of ill-effects among those who work closely with them.

Industrial workers usually act as the public’s canary, because their exposure to a new hazard is much more intense. There are no industrial diseases or injuries linked to radio waves - unlike, say, radioactive materials, asbestos, or some chemicals.

The mobile phones research programme has at least dispelled the myths. People who claim to be sensitive to electromagnetic fields, for example, are not. They cannot tell if the fields are switched on or off. Whatever causes their symtoms, it is not the signals from mobile phones or their base stations. Experiments that appeared to show biological effects in cells have been repeated and failed to show anything.

All that remains, like the grin of a vanishing Cheshire Cat, is the tiny hint, not reaching statistical significance, of an increased risk of some brain cancers in long-term users. This must be followed up, clearly, but for the moment there is no evidence that mobile phones pose any risks at all. While this if good news, the public had long ago made up its mind. There are now nearly as many mobile phones in use as there are people in the UK. Not much evidence there that the general public ever took the alarm very seriously.

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