Apart from the mistake, the sentence at the bottom of the notification doesn't make sense to me, "YOU MUST NOT IGNORE THIS NOTICE, OR PASS IT TO THE DRIVER" forbids you from doing either of those things, when the latter is obviously what you must do if you aren't the driver!
The equivalent in Western Australia says something like:-"If you were not driving, pass it on to the driver."
That is because English Uncivil Servants have completely lost touch, both with the service's traditional ethos and with the people they are supposed to
serve.
Arguably the best writing style guide for English is
"The Complete Plain Words" by Sir Ernest Gowers which essentially grew out of advice on style that he provided to the Civil Service so that they might communicate clearly, concisely and unambiguously. It was produced when the second world war massively increased the number of people that the Government had to inform or interact with and consequently meant that ordinary folks without years of schooling in interpreting gobbledegook officialese had to be able to actually understand what was put in front of them. Gowers complained that official writing was full of "mistiness and grandiloquence" and argued for clear, plain English to be used.
For many years
"The Complete Plain Words" was an official government publication and required reading for Civil Servants. Gowers had a sense of humour too, his introduction to
"The Complete Plain Words" contained this:
"The purpose of this book is to help officials in their use of written English. To some of them this may seem a work of supererogation, calculated only to place an unnecessary burden on a body of people already overburdened."I suspect you could hear the sound of those words flying over the heads of some Civil Servant Mandarins even today.
Also the Civil Service was the source of
the best book on designing forms ever written and is still published by The Stationery Office (formerly HMSO). Both books seem to have fallen off the reading lists of Civil Servants. Sometimes you get an official form to fill in that, if you know the style, was obviously produced by one of those few remaining Civil Servants that actually bothered to read the handbook and it is a breeze to complete. Most of the time you get forms designed by people who 'didn't read the memo' and are left with an ambiguous mess to try and interpret. It's notable that the old school clear writing and well designed forms started to disappear in the 1980s as privatisation and 'agency status' for former government departments overtook the world.
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